roots

I've been doing some research into the family of my maternal grandmother, whose surname was Cox. Having never really come across the name much I was somewhat taken aback by just how common it was in the part of Gloucestershire they come from (near Stroud, should you be interested!). If that wasn't enough it appears that just about every family in the village had a daughter who was either born Ann Cox or became Ann Cox through marriage, which made tracing my Great x3 Granny even more complicated!

The menfolk have somewhat less common names; Laban, Benjamin, Ira & Reuben. So that should've be easier right? Yeah right... how can people simply disappear for a couple of decades? Or appear in a census as very much alive thank you but not appear in any Death records? Well not that we could find at first, leaving a conundrum - Laban must've died somewhere otherwise he'd be 190yrs old by now, and much as the idea appeals I didn't think we had Time Lords or Immortals in the family.

So in an attempt to make sense of some of what was going on I started looking at the bigger picture; how come so many people from Bisley, Gloucestershire ended up in Halifax, West Riding of Yorkshire around the mid 1800s, and who were they?

After trawling through the census records from 1841 (the first one done) to 1891 for the district I started tracking various families and individuals over the years. I've no idea (yet...) how many of the Cox families listed are related to me, but I found myself getting quite emotionally involved in their histories. Having studied this period for my Social & Economic History A Level, plus having read a fair amount of historical fiction set in this era, I know a reasonable amount about it. However it was one thing learning about it in an abstract fashion, and quite another following the lives and deaths of real people, especially when they might be related to me. It was sobering to see how many children simply didn't make it from one census to the next, ten years later. The oldest person I recorded was 75, and few got to more than 60. Children as young as 7 and 8 had occupations listed next to their names in the 1841 census, and the designation 'pauper' was next to several names. One was living in the workhouse and another the local orphanage, several were servants in later decades and the earlier ones were full of weavers and spinners of both wool and silk, workers at various stages of the walking stick manufacturing industry (stick cutters, varnishers, polishers and bone carvers). Watermen (whatever that may mean!), railway labourers and agricultural labourers made regular appearances but the trade that cropped up again and again was stonemasonry, and that is what took sometimes just the menfolk, but sometimes entire families, up to Halifax.

According to a local history website, the district had had a lot of textile small scale industry, both wool and silk. The industrial revolution hit the area hard in the mid 1830s and many were left out of work. I've not yet figured out what the stonemasons were all working on until the 1850s that kept them in the area, but in the 1851 and 1861 census returns there are several families where the 'head' of the household is absent and the wife listed as 'wife of a stonemason'. Family tradition has it that Halifax Town Hall was built by members of our family (plus a few hundred others no doubt...) and that seems to be born out by the number of stonemasons from Bisley, including a few Coxs, who appear in the Halifax census returns in 1861.

Eventually the mystery was solved, it turned out that there weren't two Labans in the Bisley area about 10yrs apart in age, but just the older one, and someone had stuffed up (made up?) his age on a subsequent census entry. It turns out that his son Benjamin, my G.G.Grandad was from his second marriage, and the other Coxs they are later listed as living with in Halifax are from the first marriage. The reason it was all confusing is in the earliest census returns Laban is listed as living with his first family, and in the later one in Bisley he's just with his younger family, the older children being at a different address.

So it appeared that alas, no Time Lords in the family after all. Well that was until we started trying to research Benjamin's wife Janet who appears in the marriage register, several census records and the death register, but is conspicuous by her absence from any birth registers or census returns from the part of Scotland where she was supposedly born and spent her childhood! I'm reasonably certain she didn't die from having her head lopped off with a sword though as that would've caused quite a stir in Halifax in 1917, so that at least rules out her being an Immortal! Seems we're stuck with invisible for the time being instead.

A bizarre twist to the tale has been in relating some of these research challenges to long standing friends I've found that two of them also have Cox ancestry in the family from that part of Gloucestershire! I know it has long been said that Quakers makes the world a smaller place, but I wasn't expecting to end up potentially related to people I've known over half my life who also happen to have made their home in Aotearoa NZ!