OTHER SINGLE-PARENT CHILDREN

Earlier in the year an essay titled Orphans and Single-Parent children was posted in Family History Updates. This shows a dynastic line in which one or both parents died leaving young children The essay attempts to show how the children recovered from the painful loss of their parent(s) and were brought up and educated by the surviving parent and/or relations who gave them long-term tender loving care, and financial support. Scattered through the family tree there are other examples where young children lost a father or mother, and two examples where great-grandchildren received legacies in trust with the ‘interest and dividends thereon’ being paid out for their ‘maintenance, education and upbringing’ until they ‘attained the age of twenty-one years’ when they ‘respectively on attaining said age’ received their share of the principal and accrued interest and dividends. These were the descendants of:

 

Thomas Barcham

Bathsheba Barcham, was eight when her father Thomas Barcham died in 1798 aged 39. Thomas was the youngest son of Sarah (née Dybal) and William Barcham (Jnr). Bathsheba’s mother Ann probably looked after the young girl but she died on 1 January 1807 aged 16. At present, nothing more is known about them except that Thomas, Ann (d. 1831, aged 77) and Bathsheba are buried at Worstead Baptist Chapel, Meeting Hill.

 

John Juler

There were two descendants of Hannah (née Dyball) and John Juler of North Walsham whose families had one or more children who lost a parent before their sixteenth birthday

 

Mary Juler and William Lound’s family and two subsequent generations had families in which one or more children under the age of sixteen lost either their father or mother.

Mary (née Juler) died in 1837. She left her estate to her two children:

Mary Ann was then aged 11. She married her cousin John Lound, an auctioneer and estate agent in Kensington, London, and had eleven children.

Henry, aged 7 when his mother died, used his legacy to emigrate to Australia in 1852, where he married (1) Mary Malinda Lea in Sydney. Mary, aged 26, died after giving birth to a son Henry Archibald Lound, who survived for only 24 days. This was a double tragedy for the bereaved father. Six years later, Henry (Snr) married (2) Jane Meyn, by whom he had ten children.

Frederick Silby Lound (b. 1867) was 18 when his mother died. He married single-parent child, Marguerite Helen D’Arcy Dashwood. Marguerite was the youngest of the five children of Eliza Mary Glenister and Henry Edward D’Arcy Dashwood. She was two years old when her father died in 1868.  Marguerite and Frederick had six children, two of whom were under 16 when their father died in 1919:

Vera Lound, aged 15;

Florence Margery Lound, aged 14.

Jane and Frederick’s four youngest children were under 16 when their mother died in Sydney in November 1885, aged 46:

Florence Juler Lound (b. 1870) aged 14;

William Herbert Juler (b. 1872) aged 13;

Ethel Evelyn Juler (b. 1874) aged 11;

Percy Edwin Juler (b. 1877) aged 8;

Louisa Elizabeth (b. 1880) aged 5.

 

William Bryce Lound (b. 1895, in NSW) was a grandson of Jane and Henry Lound. He married Pearl Matilda Agnes Young. Their three children were under 16 when their mother died at Brisbane in 1934, aged 35:

                   William Bryce Lound (b. 1920) aged 14;

                   Edgar D’Arcy Lound (b. 1922) aged 12;

                   Sibley Lound.

 

It is not known how these children coped with the loss of their parent; nor the support they received from the surviving parent and relatives. 

 

Among the descendants of Alice (née Nailer) and William Juler of Burnham, it was traumatic for Ernest Herbert Juler when his wife Amelia died in February 1881, aged 23, leaving two children:

Ernest Henry Herbert Juler, then aged 30 months, was sent to live with his widowed grandmother Elizabeth Ladd in Southwold, Suffolk, where he spent the rest of his life. Following in his grandfather’s, uncle’s and father’s trade, Ernest Herbert became a master jeweller and watchmaker.

Esther Dora Juler (b. 1880) was an infant when her mother died. It is not known if she predeceased her mother, or if she survived and eventually married her cousin Walter Edward Juler (b. 1868), the natural born son of Alice Juler.

  

John Barcham

Elizabeth Helsdon (b. 1752), wife of John Barcham, was a young child when her father Samuel Helsdon (b.1726, at Suffield) died [the date of his death is not known]  Elizabeth was raised by her devout mother  Thomasine (née Hedge).

 

Children of Isabel (née Green) and Arthur Robertson Browning

Isabel, the daughter of Emma (née Crandall) and John Barcham Green, of Maidstone, went to India where she married Arthur Robertson Browning, at Nangpur in 1887, when she was 24. Major Browning was sent to Northern China in 1900 and was killed at Funing in April 1901, while leading 100 men of the fourth  Punjab Infantry in an action against Boxer rebels. At the time of his death, Isabel, then aged 38, was probably in India, but her three children were in England, where they were raised:

Charles Stewart Browning (b.1891 d.1916), aged 10 when his father was killed, was at a boarding school in Folkestone. Later, he became a cadet at the Royal Military College and in 1911, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Indian Army. He became a captain in the Duke of Connaught’s Own 129th Baluchis Regiment and was serving with them in East Africa when he was killed in action against the Germans in Tanganyika in December 1916, aged 25. 

Isabel Norah (b.1895 d.1963) was 6 when her father was killed. She and her younger sister were living with their widowed grandmother Emma (nee Crandell) Barcham. She went to South Africa where she worked as a governess before moving to Kenya, where she met and married Maurice John Fitzpartick, who was managing a coffee plantation and later went to Cape Town

Isabel Mary (b.1897 d.1969) was 4 when her father died. She did not marry. 

 

Benjamin Barcham

There are six families in which descendants of Mary (née Banfather) and Benjamin Barcham where one or more children lost a parent:

 

Benjamin Barcham left ₤100 to each of his great-grandchildren (names not known) after their mother Sarah Ann (née Fuller), wife of Revd Richard Daniel  of Caister, died sometime before 1839.

 

Georgiana Barcham (b. 1818) was 3 when her father James died. In her grandfather’s will she received a bequest of ₤500 after the death of her grandmother Mary (nee Banfather) Barcham, to be held in trust until she was 21. However, Mary lived until 1845, one year after Georgiana had married.

 

Mabel (née Barcham) wife of John Anderson, was 31 when she died giving birth to her second child in 1851, who survived. The two children were raised by their widowed grandmother, Mabel (née Harland) Barcham who left both of them bequests of one-quarter of the proceeds of the sale of her estate when she died in 1876:

Mabel Harland Anderson (b. 1849) was 2 when her mother died. She lived with her grandmother at Mattishall, Norfolk until the latter died in 1876) . Mabel Anderson was a spinster when she died in early 1880.

John Barcham Anderson (b.1851) lived with his sister and grandmother. He moved to London before 1871 and worked for a grocer and later became a policeman. In 1871, when he was about 20 married Eliza Ann Robinson (b. 1851) whose father had died sometime before the wedding. Eliza and John Barcham Anderson had four children. At present, it is not known if Eliza died while the children were under 15 years, but their father was 65 when he died in 1916.  .   

 

Rosina Jemima Bell, who married James Connor Barcham in 1884, appears to have been an orphan. She was born in Bethnal Green, London, in about 1868. Her parents, Susannah and George Robert Courtney Bell, were enumerated in the 1861 Census of Middlesex, but not in the 1871 census, so they might both have died before Rosina was 3 years old; and she might been adopted by her uncle John Bell and his wife Amelia, with whom she was living at 18 Parker Street, St Giles-in-the-East Parish when the family was enumerated in 1881. This is corroborated by Rosina and James’ marriage registration at the Parish Church of St Jude, which states that the bride’s father was George Courtney Bell (deceased), as was the groom’s father John Anderson.

 

Frank Edward Augustine Barcham, a grandson of Susan Ann (née James) and James Barcham, survived WWI in France but his young wife Sarah (née Hamilton) died in 1928, aged 36, leaving three young children to grieve their loss :

Frank Charles Barcham was 15 when his mother died. He served in the army during WWII, and married when he was almost 41. 

Leonard John Barcham, aged 13 when his mother died, was a pupil at Paston School from 1929 to 1933, joined the RAF as a navigator and was awarded the DFC. He was 35 when he married. 

Doreen Alice Barcham, was 2 years and six months old when her mother died. During WWII, she served in the Women’s Land Army and was an Auxiliary Nurse. She was 20 when she married a Royal Navy Petty Officer.  

At the time of Sarah’s death, the family’s home was in Chadwell Heath, Essex, but Frank was at Paston School in North Walsham, where his brother joined him two years later. One of Frank and Sarah’s grandchildren writes that it was only after Frank and Leonard’s deaths that ‘I began to realize just how traumatic it was and how differently it affected each of them.’

 

Nathan John Barcham, son of Jocelyn and Kenneth John Barcham, a descendant of Maria (née Sunman) and Barcham Barcham, was chief radiologist at Blue Mountains Hospital in Sydney before he died of leukaemia at the age of 36, leaving  three young children aged 12, 9 and 3 in the care of his widow Rebecca. Fortunately they have loving grandparents and other relations living nearby