Skip to main content

A tale of three weddings, pt 2 - William’s story.

 

As mentioned in part 1, William Holyland was born in the village of Syston, Leicestershire, and baptised there on Jan 21 1844. William was the fourth child of 5 born to Thomas Holyland and his wife Sarah.

Many of the men in this branch of the family worked as butchers, but William’s father seems to have changed jobs frequently, being listed variously as butcher, coal merchant, carter, and labourer. William’s childhood must have been disrupted by several unhappy events -  his mother’s death in 1847; his father’s conviction and imprisonment in 1848 for receiving stolen goods; and the trials of his uncle, also from Syston, who was implicated in the manslaughter of another man and ultimately committed suicide in 1854. Perhaps these events contributed to William and his father leaving the area so that in 1861, as mentioned in part 1, William was in Nottinghamshire and his father was in Derbyshire.

Following his marriage to Hannah Slater in Ashbourne in 1864, William then disappeared from the censuses until 1891, when he reappeared with a different wife and two small children in Ringwood, Hampshire.  By then he was working as a plater on the railway.

Eventually I tracked his passage through the intervening years. In November 1866, 22 year old William “Holeyland” (sic) of Syston, Leicestershire, enlisted in Liverpool  into the 18th regiment of foot, receiving a bounty of £1 “and a free kit”.

The record confirms his occupation as a labourer, but he declared himself unmarried. He was a well-built young man, being 5’ 6’’ tall and 174lbs weight, with “very good muscular development”.  He subsequently saw service in Ireland, Malta, Afghanistan, India and Egypt. An early “hiccup” occurred when in 1868, he deserted. He was at liberty for nearly a year before being convicted in Alfreton, Derbyshire, of felony. He was using the name of Henry Jones but his true identity was discovered and he was handed back to the army on his release, to serve a further 6 months imprisonment (1)

Through 21 years in the army, he never rose above the rank of private, but apart from the above episode, and a couple of early run-ins for drunkenness, his conduct was assessed as good, and he was eventually medically discharged in 1887. By this time he was stationed in Devonport and had married Georgiana Kearl. Their marriage certificate (1886) once again confirms William’s father as Thomas Holyland, a butcher, and the subsequent censuses clearly show that this was the William born in Syston.

 

William lived the rest of his years in Ringwood and died there in 1921.

His story seems unremarkable except for one fact – on his second marriage certificate, he is described as “batchelor”. 

Had his first wife, Hannah, died?  I had been unable to find any trace of her. Or was this marriage indeed bigamous and the “batchelor” statement a knowing lie? More investigation was needed, as detailed in part 3!

 

1. Nottingham Journal 02 June 1869

https://holylandons.blogspot.com/2020/12/a-tale-of-three-weddings-pt-1-first.html 

 https://holylandons.blogspot.com/2020/12/a-tale-of-three-weddings-pt-3-hannahs.html 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Holyland - a surname, not just a place!

Holyland - a name and not just a place! Of all the surnames in the world, Holyland is one of the less common. The website Forebears.io uses data from 2014 and tells us that Holyland is the 594,449 th Most Common Surname in the World -- or to put it another way, not very common at all ! According to the Forebears site, approximately 522 people shared the Holyland surname in 2014. The majority (about 2/3) of these were in England; the majority of the other Holylands were in Australia, with tiny numbers of others of this name scattered across the globe, from the USA to China and Jordan.                ( map and data c/o Forebears, https://forebears.io/surnames/holyland) So where did this surname come from? When I found the name in my family tree --it was the maiden name of my great-grandmother - I felt quite excited, assuming that this maybe signified a link to the ge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Swimming lessons

Arthur Holyland was born in 1877 in Wortley, a village to the north of Sheffield, in Yorkshire. Like his father and grandfather before him, Arthur trained as a blacksmith. When he was a child, Arthur's family moved from the rural setting of Wortley and into the heavily industrialised centre of Sheffield, which at the time was one of the world's leading centres for the manufacturing of steel items. In August 1899, Arthur enlisted into the Royal Marines, giving his age as 2 years younger than his baptism proves. He served on a variety of vessels before being invalided out of the Marines in 1908. My eye was caught by a small box at the bottom of the Marines enlistment form . "Able to swim?" – Yes, Arthur could swim – he was tested on this in December 1899, in Deal, Kent, four months after joining the Royal Marines. How did a blacksmith from a heavily industrialised town in a landlocked county learn to swim, I asked myself. It transpires that in 1892, a tidal swi...
Post a Comment
Read more

An unusual marriage certificate

  Willoughby Holyland was born in 1868 in Lutterworth, Leicestershire; there is no entry for his mother’s maiden name on the birth registration, implying that he was illegitimate. He was listed in 1871 as “Willie”, the 1 year old son of Charles Holyland, a shoeing smith in Lutterworth, and his wife Ann. Three other children were listed in the same family, including a William apparently only one year old than “Willie”. Immediately this duplication of names sounds suspicious! Charles repeated that he was Willoughby’s father, as well as William’s, in 1881. In 1891, Willoughby, now a tailor by trade, was still in Charles’ and Ann’s household, but this time described as Charles’s nephew. Willoughby’s marriage certificate sheds light on his true parentage. In August 1899, he married Lily Sarah Beatrice Davies at St Jude’s Church, in Birmingham. In my experience of looking at Victorian marriage certificates, those born illegitimately usually either have a line drawn through the box ...
Post a Comment
Read more