The Offley Family Society             Offley Newsbrief  No. I

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 Offley Newsflash Nos. 1 to 3

Congratulations to ...

Matthew William Offley [FEN C9] on his marriage to Michelle Ann Bentley at St. Ippolyts Church, Hitchin, on 2nd September.  Matthew, who designed our website, is a brother of Kevin, our webmaster.

Charles Laurie [STA F2] who has been offered a place at Oxford to read for a doctorate.  Charles leaves for England on 27th September and will be studying the relationship between politics and intimidation in Zimbabwe's post-independence land dispute.  His new address in England and new e-mail address will be published shortly.

Sad News from Canada

It is with sadness that I have to record the death on 1st September of Mr. G.W.C. Offley of Ontario after a road accident.  Known as Clive, he was a member of this Society and his ancestry can be seen in the Offley of Shirley Pedigree. It is hoped to publish a full obituary later.

A Latterday Emigrant

Mrs. Jane Evans has sent to the Society a news cutting she received from her sister in Montreal.

Robert Offley is the President and C.E.O. of Fusepoint Managed Services Inc. in Vancouver and Toronto. He is the son of the late F.C.T. Offley and appears in Section A of the Offley of Cannock Pedigree. Robert was born in Croydon and lived in Guilden Morden, Cambridgeshire, before taking up his appointment in Canada. The website for Fusepoint includes a photograph of him.

Holy Orders

A most useful website is being developed at <www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/cce> with the intention of documenting the careers of all Church of England clergymen from 1540 to 1835.  Although in its early days at least three members of the Offley of Stafford pedigree are already included.

I will willingly look up any individual record for members without internet access and I should be pleased to hear from other members who find any reference which expands the information shown in the Offley Pedigrees.

JRR

Internet News

Another website that will be of interest to some of our members concerns the Genealogy of the Hall family from Bristol <www.hillmanc.fsnet.co.uk/hall.htm>.  Elizabeth Petingale Wilson [STA E15] married into this family and her descendants are shown on three pages of the 13-page GEDCOM file.  Brice Clagett, a former member of the Society, is descended from this line.

Additions to the Archives

Frank Carnell has sent a collection of photographs of the Offley gravestones in the Greendale Cemetery, New South Wales, together with maps of the area and other photographs..  William Offley [FEN A2] and his half sister Hannah emigrated to Australia to an area about 60 miles north of Canberra.  Hannah married William Carnell [FEN A5] and the Offley and Carnell families flourished in the area - to such an extent that there is now an Offley Lane and a Carnell Lane.  With the photographs Frank also sent extracts from the registers of births, deaths and marriages which has enabled the Pedigree to be expanded.

Brian Offler has sent a press cutting concerning the celebration of the 100th birthday in August of Elizabeth Offiler [LEN II 2 (4)].  Elizabeth takes pride in her garden and still digs, plants and weeds it.  She attributes her longevity to taking a spoonful of glucose with her cup of tea.  Her birthday was marked by a visit from a local Councillor and other officials and a telegram (or its 21st century equivalent) from H.M. the Queen.

John M Offley has been looking at the British Library website and has found a print of  Possingworth, in Waldron, formerly the seat of Thomas Offley.  This has now been included in Section 16 of the Offley Archives.

Smallpox

                                              “What is your fortune, my pretty maid?”

                                              “My face is my fortune, sir,” she said.

So said the dairymaid, who was probably one of the very few in the village whose face was not disfigured by pock marks.

Smallpox in Norwich was the title of an article in Newsletter No. 11, published in 1989. It showed the relationship between the Offley, Bohun and Wortley-Montagu families and their involvement with the prevention of smallpox by inoculation. Inoculation was the injection of live smallpox material and from it vaccination was developed by Edward Jenner, who experimented with cowpox; vaccination afterwards became the accepted form of prevention.

The following article is reproduced, by kind permission, from The Metropolitan of April 2004 and was written by Mrs. Lilian Gibbens, the Chairman of the London, Westminster and Middlesex Family History Society, and gives further details of the disease.

Copies of our Newsletter No. 11, mentioned above, are available, price £1.00 post free.

Great, great, grandfather had smallpox

At the church of St. Nicholas in Worth Matravers in Dorset you will find the following memorial inscription: SACRED/To the Memory/of/Benjm JESTY (of Downshay)/who departed this Life/April 16^th, 1816/aged 79 years/He was born at Yetminster in this/County, and was an upright honest/Man; particularly noted for having been the first Person (Known) that/introduced the Cow Pox/by Inoculation, and who from/his great strength of mind made the/Experiment from the [Cow] on/his Wife and two Sons in the Year 1774.

The first vaccinator against smallpox was a farmer, Benjamin JESTY, who anticipated Dr. Edward Jenner, by transferring pus from a cow’s udder, using a cobbler’s needle, into his wife and children. It wasn’t until May 1796, in the village below Berkeley Castle on the River Severn, that Jenner took pus from the cowpox-infested Sara Nelmes and scratched onto the arm of eight year old James Phipps. In July he scratched the boy with human smallpox pus – and nothing happened. He repeated the experiment some months later, but the child still remained free of small-pox. Of course, Lady Mary WORTLEY-MONTAGUE, a mere girl of eighteen, had already imported into England, in 1718, the Turkish idea of vaccination, when she inoculated her son. She conducted experiments in England on convicted criminals awaiting execution and also, as a control, used a Chinese technique of placing dried pustules up the nostrils of yet another criminal. Whatever the method, those inoculated escaped the smallpox and thus the gallows.

It is fairly certain that you will not find a description of the symptoms and course of the disease in a modern home medical reference book, as the World Health Organisation has now declared the disease to have been eradicated. I had to turn to a very old edition of Pears Cyclopaedia to find a simple description.

Smallpox attacked people of all ages. Most common in the tropics, it was carried by excreta and droplet infection, but especially by the dried scales of the skin of a convalescent patient. In England and New England in America, there were epidemics in the late seventeenth century, ravaging families. The diarist john EVELYN lost both his daughters in 1685 (Mary in March and Elizabeth in August). The four children of the Essex clergyman and diarist, Ralph Josselin – his sons John and Thomas, who came to London to be apprenticed, and his daughters, Ann and Elizabeth, who came as servant girls, all survived the disease, although generally migrant workers from the countryside usually fell prey to the disease, having no immunity whatsoever. Apprentices and smart lads seeking employment had to prove they had had smallpox, and so would not contract it and thus kill their masters; maidservants advertised their recovery from it. Public houses advertising that they were well aired and free from disease. Smallpox claimed one in five deaths and more or less everyone contracted it. In 1746 over 3000 Londoners died in an outbreak; victims were buried at night, in terror, carried to their graves on a farm cart driven by men well pickled in beer. The resultant pockmarks were useful when identifying criminals and runaway apprentices – or husbands. Both ladies and gentlemen disguised their pockmarks with patches, which led to a ‘fashion’ for patches. Tom Brown declared: ‘Some of them having scabbed or pimpled faces wear a thousand patches to hide them, and those that have none, scandalise their faces by a foolish imitation’. Bills of Mortality often lumped together the diseases of smallpox, chicken pox and measles because of the red rash: ‘Flox, small pox and measles . . . . . 1031’. Measles was a childhood disease and would have caused a large number of deaths.

It was a constant terror during the eighteenth century and existed in epidemics until the mid-nineteenth century. The early transportees to Australia carried the disease with them and it decimated the aboriginal population. If you read local newspapers, you will find reports of small outbreaks until well into the twentieth century. Indeed, the writer was involved in an outbreak in Fleet Street during the 1960s, when a staff member from a newspaper returned from the East and developed the disease. He was sent to an Isolation Hospital and all the staff members ­– and their families – had to be vaccinated as a precaution.

Similar to chicken pox in many ways, smallpox (variola) began with shivering, headache, backache and a raised temperature. On the third day a rash of red spots appeared on the forehead, spreading to the scalp and then downwards over the body and perhaps internally; the rash later turned into blisters (vesicles), which then filled with pus. It caused blindness or death through suffocation if the membranes in the mouth swelled up and obstructed breathing. If the patient managed to survive, in 12 days the blisters dried up and dropped off. A really effective drug was not discovered until the late 1960s.

One Robert SUTTON and his son, Daniel, advertised commodious inoculation houses around London, where individuals could suffer the inevitable mild attack, until they became safe to mix with others, after the scabs had dropped. The Suttons offered their clients full board with a more than adequate daily menu, offering fish, poultry, and mutton, and wine to wash it down with at two guineas a week. Tea was not offered as this was too expensive. They treated over 30,000 patients, and suffered only a four per cent mortality. Not unnaturally, their neighbours were outraged and the Royal College of Physicians were furiously angry because Daniel was not qualified.

It must be remembered that only the rich were able to afford vaccination and a great number of people died from the small pox. It was not until 1840 that free vaccination was introduced for all infants; in 1853 such vaccination became compulsory. This triggered off the usual fight for personal ‘rights’ and in 1867 the Anti-Vaccination League was formed. An Act of 1899 allowed conscientious objection to vaccination and in 1948 the compulsory vaccination of infants ceased. In 1977 smallpox was eradicated. And so ended the disease which Macauley said ’turned the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered and made the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover’.                                                    LG

Royal Descendants

Correspondence in the Daily Telegraph in March 2005 referred to illegitimate descendants of Henry I and Henry II.  However, legitimate descent may be claimed by the progeny of Margaret Offley who married Stephen Kirton in the 16th century.  According to a posting on the Rainsford Genealogical Forum Stephen Kirton’s ancestry is as follows:

John Kirton born 1450 and Margaret White.
Margaret Gainsford and Knight Robert White born 1456.
John White (Whyte) and Eleanor Hungerford.
Robert Hungerford born 1409 and Margaret De Beautreaux.
Lord William De Beautreaux III born 1388 and Elizabeth Beaumont.
John Beaumont 4th Lord born 1361 and Katherine Everingham.
Henry Beaumont 3rd Lord born 1340 and Margaret De Vere.
John Beaumont 2nd Lord born 1318 and Alianor of Lancaster born 1311.
Henry of Lancaster 3rd Earl born 1281 and Maude De Chaworth.
Edmund of Lancaster (Earl) born 1244 and Blanche D'Artrois.
King Henry III of England born 1207 and Eleanor De Provence born 1217.

Can any member corroborate this?

Paul Delaney [STA C XV], who recently resigned from the Society, would thus be able to claim Royal descent. Brice Clagett [STA E15], also a former member, who was himself descended from a sister of Margaret Offley, married his 14th cousin, Virginia Lawrence Parker [STA C2 XV], another possible descendant of Henry III. Can any other Member claim Royal descent?

The Offley Pedigrees

This quarter’s update includes amended or additional pages for the following sections:

Fenstanton  C1  C9     Stafford  C2  E15  F4  F12     Wolverhampton     Shirley

Prices (post paid):  Individual sections  50p           Complete update (20pp)  £2.00.

(Order from 2 The Green, Codicote, Hitchin.  SG4 8UR)

Annual fee (usually 4 updates):  £4.00 (Disk or CD-ROM £2.00}.

Membership List

Amended address: Mr F Carnell, 2 Jodie Court, Diamond Creek, 3089 Australia.

Amended Telephone No.: Mr & Mrs KD Offley - 01462 629625.

Cessations: Mr EJ Wright [FEN A2]  Miss JA Brown [FEN C3]  Mr BM Clagett [STA E15]  Mrs D Offiler [LEN A]

New FFHS publications

The following publications of the Federation of Family History Societies have been received by the Society.

Tracing your Twentieth Century Family History by Stuart A.Raymond £6.80

Most people rely on family hearsay, registration and the census for the 20th Century. But there is so much more, hence the twenty-two chapters covering such things as Newspapers, Monumental Inscriptions, Church Records of every denomination and Street Directories, to name just a few. Then, in case you have forgotten something, there is a Miscellaneous section. It is designed to fit your pocket, acting both as a preliminary guide as well as an aide-memoir.

History’s Midwives: Including a 17th and 18th Century Yorkshire Midwives Nominations Index by Joan E.Grundy  £8.25

The book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with midwives in history, together with eight appendices and a bibliography, and the second part consists of indices, by name and place, of 2000 Yorkshire Midwives Nominations from C1649, 1662 – 1736 and 1772.

The four un-numbered chapters in part 1 deal with the ‘History of Licensing Midwives, the Role of the Midwife in C17th and C18th England, C17th and C18th Childbirth in England and a Conclusion’.

The author is a nurse and a midwife, who writes with authority about her subject.

First Name Variants by Alan Bardsley  Third Edition  £7.15

My first reaction to the title of this book was who wants to waste their time studying such a boring subject as how to spell the same first names in different ways. However, I soon ‘saw the light’ when I realised that it is very important to identify an ancestor, when the same person can appear in different records with a variety of forms of a given name. It can be just as important as being able to identify an ancestor when his surname is spelt in different ways.

This book consists, primarily, of a really useful index of first names and their variants, which has been compiled from many sources. It is designed to help you in identifying whether someone recorded with two or more different forenames is, in fact, only one person. The Introduction includes sections on the sources used, the compiler’s sorting methods, the ‘Development and History of Variants’, an all-important section on how to use this book, as well as acknowledgements and bibliography. This briefly mentions how our forenames developed from everyday language words, which were later altered by misspelt and phonetic variants.

This is a fascinating book and this new edition is a welcome addition to the family historian’s bookshelf.

Researching Brewery and Publican Ancestors by Simon Fowler £4.95

In the UK, the history of pubs, breweries and brewing goes back several hundred years. Unfortunately, for many years, mergers, take-overs and cessations of brewery companies have been the norm. Many organisations kept their own internal records and this often made research difficult, with the records of interest often held in totally unexpected and possibly remote locations.

The author looks at some of the records that a family historian can use to find out about publicans, their staff and brewery workers. Most, but not all of these, fall into two categories: the internal records of the brewery and the records kept by local and central government as part of the regulation of the licensed trade. Such documentation includes licenses, brewery records, insurance records, trade directories and newspapers. He has included a detailed glossary, bibliography and some relevant websites. However, of possibly greater interest is the listing of numerous trade newspapers held at the British Library Newspaper Library, and details of various specialists archives with significant holdings of brewing and drink-related material. Many family historians, including myself, will have an ancestor who worked in the licensed trade and this booklet gives excellent guidance as to how to find out more about their lives. Those members of the Society who are descended from the Offilers of the brewery of that name will be particularly interested in the comments expressed about it in this booklet, reference to which is made elsewhere in this newsletter.

Members are reminded that all of these publications are obtainable from the Federation of Family History Societies (Publications) Ltd. units 15-16, Chesham Industrial Estate, Oram Street, Bury, Lancashire, BL9 6EN. The prices quoted are inclusive of UK postage, overseas postage is extra.

HGO

Exchange Journals received

Metropolitan July and Oct 2004, - The July issue included a list of surnames registered by members of the London, Westminster and Middlesex Family History Society.  Jul 2005.

“The Flowing Stream”, Sheffield & D.F.H.S. Autumn 2004 - including “The York Minster Archives - a little known source”; “The Refractory Brick Industry in the Bradfield Area” and “Explosion at Dyson’s Brickworks”.  Winter 2004 -  microfiche of  Members’ Interests received.  Spring 2005 and Summer 2005. The former includes a note that Jos Kingston <www.joskingston.org> has made an in-depth study of Norton, Derbyshire (the home of one branch of the Offley of Stafford family). The parish register for 1560 to1620 is now on a database; details from <joskingston.plus.com >. This issue also contains a very interesting article on the study of surnames by Professor David Hey.  Publications available from the Society are given in a separate booklet.

Derbyshire F.H.S. Sep 2004 - “Food Adulteration in the 1860’s” - makes a handful of “E” numbers look a positive health cure!  The Dec 2004 issue includes an account of the church built at Osmaston, near Ashbourne, in 1845 and an extract from the Derbyshire section of the National Memorial Card Index.  Surnames from “A” to “C” are listed and further extracts will be published in the future.  The Nottinghamshire section has already been published and cards from the index may be claimed by proven descendants of the families to which they refer.  Further details of the index may be obtained from Mr. Phillip Jones, 40 Regina Crescent, Ravenshead, Nottingham, NG15 9AE.

“Midland Ancestor”, September 2004 - Further notes on William Shakespeare’s family. Details of two museums are given, viz. “The Pen Museum” by Harry Scharf and  “The Avery Historical Museum” by Pauline Saul. (Avery scales at Smethwick)  See www.averyberkel.com for more information with regard to the latter.  December 2004. Mar 2005, includes a 34pp booklet of publications.  Jun, Sep 2005.

Shropshire F.H.S. Journal, Sep 2004 - General articles include  notes on the preservation of photographs and of electronic data.  The Dec 2004 issue is accompanied by a 44-page special edition commemorating the Society’s Silver Jubilee.  Mar and June 2005, includes a 28pp booklet of publications. Report on he DNA project for the Preen family.

Ormskirk & D.F.H.S. Oct 2004, Feb 2005, jun 2005. The October issue includes items extracted by Jean Kidman from the Church Wardens Accounts for the Parish of Ormskirk for 1665-66.  Disbursements for the maintenance of the church and other parochial obligations are of course included but there are also many entries concerning payments for the destruction of vermin.  Parishioners were paid 2d for hedgehogs (orchants) and kides (kites), 1s for foxes, 1/2d for magpies(pianets), jays     (gees),  moles (mauderts) and mopes.  (I am unable to discover the identity of this last item.) Hedgehogs were the most numerous of the vermin, totalling 112, followed by magpies (84) and moles (69).  There were 47 jays, 34 mopes, 5 kites and 3 foxes. Over 20 parishioners were rewarded and there did not seem to be any particular person who was performing in a professional capacity. In the six months from November to April 1665/6 over 350 vermin were taken – an average of about two per day - and no doubt the bounty paid was a useful supplement in the winter months for some of the parishioners.

Lancashire F.H. & H.S. August and November 2004 -  August issue includes “Notes on Sources, 42: Poor Law Records”, by W.J.Taylor.  A history of the Poor Law and associated records.  Feb and May 2005. The February issue contains an interesting and illustrated article on heraldry.

Derbyshire Family History Society. Mar 2005, includes a 12pp pull-out section of publications.

For Sale

The Offley Family in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire  £1.50.

The Offilers of Nottingham  £1.50.

The Offley Family Society Millennium Cookbook  £2.50.

Wychnor Park, by Roger Hailwood  £5.25.

The Offley Family Society Pens  £1.00 each - buy two get one free!

Please add an additional sum for postage.  (Order from 2 The Green, Codicote, Hitchin.  SG4 8UR.)

Published by:

THE OFFLEY FAMILY SOCIETY,

2 The Green, Codicote,  Hitchin,  SG4 8UR.  England.

Telephone:  01438 620006    E-mail:  <jackrichards@onetel.com>

  25 September 2005