The Keillors, Stonemasons of Skelton

The village of Skelton-in-Cleveland is a lovely village in the northeast part of Yorkshire, England, near North Sea.

It is also the furthest back location to which we have documented the Keillor family, although surname maps suggest the Keillors are originally from Scotland.

 A few days before we left for our trip to the UK, I found this website, https://skeltonhistorygroup.wordpress.com, run by a group of individuals interested in the local history of the area. They had extracted names and dates from the parish registers which was very helpful. 

Using the “Contact Us” tab, I sent a brief
note of thanks and mentioned we hoped to
visit during our stay. In  the bustle of getting packed
I put it out of my mind. Within a day, I got a response
from Peter, who said we must be descended from
Thomas Keillor, stonemason, who had emigrated
to North America in the 1700s. He also said
he would be glad to give us a walking tour of
Skelton if we would let him know when we would be there.
How cool is that?!?

 On the way back from Glasgow, we set up to meet Peter in Church Lane, which leads to Old All Saints church. A gentleman who lives nearby unlocked the church for us and we spent a few minutes exploring until Peter arrived.

He came prepared with a booklet of documents, all pertaining to the Keillor family in the two generations they appear to have spent in Skelton. 

John Keillor and Ann Calvert were married in nearby Guisborough in 1723/24 (calendar issues!).  In 1725, he makes his first appearance in the records of the Skelton Church warden accounts for his assessments.

In 1730, he signed the church warden accounts:

In 1757, John’s son Thomas married Mary Thompson:

Then around 1774, Thomas emigrates to Canada (and that’s another blog post!)

After we walked around the church and Peter pointed out the section that would have been standing when John and Thomas lived there, we walked around the town, where Peter showed us the spot where Thomas is thought to have lived.

Then we treated him to lunch at the Royal George Pub. We had a great time, chatting as if we were old friends. Peter has since sent additional documents and suggestions.

Three generations of Keillors back in the ancestral hometown.

What a blessing the internet is as we seek to walk in our ancestors’ footsteps!

They Want to be Found!

Recently a set of circumstances has given me more time than usual to spend searching for ancestors. (Yay me!) I have had to marvel at how the information began to roll in as I dug a little deeper, and also just because I had done something.

The first example was being contacted by a cousin on my husband Howard’s side; the surname is Wressell, from Yorkshire, England. I thought that we had the research pretty well wrapped up on that line – but can we ever say that? When Carol contacted me, I ran the name through newspapers.com to see if I could help her with her part of the family. Quite by accident (not really), I found an article on Percy Wressell, who had fought with Canadian troops during WWI and been killed. 

The Winnipeg, Canada Tribune, 16 June 1917

Of course, that meant I had to determine where he fits in the family, and that research led to finding his mother, Mary Jane, as well as four siblings. The deeper I dug, the sadder the story became. Every record that listed an occupation for her was either as “servant” or “domestic.” You don’t need to have watched every season of “Downton Abbey” to know that female servants were not only the lowest rung of the social ladder in late 19^th century England but also the most vulnerable.

The 1871 Northowram, Yorkshire, English Census

 In all of the vital, church and census records I found for Mary Jane or her five children, I found no reference to a husband/father; in fact, I located two baptismal records for two of the children where the space for the father’s name had a line through it and under the children’s names was written “privately baptized.”

West Yorkshire Church of England Baptismal record, 1879

 I found the eldest child, Walter, on a list of “Lunacy Patients Register” at age 17, and then a later record of his death in the same institution in 1913 at age 41. 

UK "Lunacy Patients Admissions Records," 1879

Mary Jane's daughter Amy died before she was two years of age. Mary Jane died, as listed in the “Nonconformist” records, at age 47 in 1892.

The website newspapers.com can be a great tool for researching ancestors, but it is a bit tricky, as it relies on the computer’s ability to read old newsprint. Further, if you have a name that is very common or is a noun in everyday use, there may be just too many hits to be able to narrow down. But another of Howard’s surnames is McTaggart, which is a much simpler name for which to search. In a typical migration pattern, the McTaggarts came from the British Isles to Canada and some filtered down into Michigan, where one of them, Louisa, married my Howard’s great-grandfather’s brother. The search for McTaggarts in newspapers.com revealed a notice in the Port Huron (MI) Times Herald that “A message received by Mr. and Mrs. David McTaggart Thursday evening told of the sad news of the death of Captain Harold Ross, killed in action…” 

Of course, I couldn’t just note that fact down and go on my way. It turns out that Captain Ross was the only child of Harold and Nellie Ross, and that Nellie Ross and Florence McTaggart were sisters from the Peter and Agnes (McCorkendale) Wright family of Ontario. Normally an officer is pretty easy to locate in one of several family history sites, but somehow, Capt. Ross has slipped through the cracks and it seems to be up to me to make sure he is not forgotten.

Another name easy to search is one from my side of the family: Alberghini. A broad search revealed that one of my Alberghinis from Renazzo, Italy married an Irish girl from Boston, Mae Nugent. She had seven siblings, including a little brother who died when he was only four years old.

Finally, the saddest story of all comes from my mother’s husband’s family, the Wheelers. His was a fairly prominent family in Newport, RI and one of the branches of the family was the Knowe family. The headline from 1943 read: Janet, Susan Knowe drown in Maryland.” According to the news article, the two girls, 8-and 4-years old were “wading on a sandbar while the mother was on the shore tending her 10-months-old baby.”

It is difficult to imagine the enormity of the pain suffered through so much sadness. I was contemplating this recently while attending our local LDS (Mormon) Atlanta Temple. As I pondered, I felt as if my spiritual eyes were opened, and I felt as never before the infinite depth and breadth of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and His healing power – and not just in this life, but for families throughout all eternity.

I will keep searching and finding them.