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A legend which linked us to a hero
05 July 2005
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Adrian Ward had his doubts when he head a family story linking him to the Norfolk hero Horatio Nelson
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When I decided to start tracing my family tree about 18 months ago I was lucky enough to be able to start with a file of information my brother had compiled from interviews with my grandmother some 30 years ago.
I was immediately intrigued by something she had remembered about one of her aunts, Alice WALLACE (nee SEWELL).
It appears Alice had pictures of Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton in her living room and her grandmother felt there might be connections with the family.
I was fairly sure we couldn't be related, since Nelson's family connections are reasonably well documented and, as far as I knew, my family did not have any associations with Norfolk.
One of these assumptions was to prove entirely wrong and, in the process of tracing my roots, I was to get closer than I ever expected to Nelson himself.
All four of my grandparents were born in the last decade of the 19th century and on the 1901 census were still children living with their parents.
When the 1901 census appeared on the internet I found my grandmother, Edith Annie Sewell, was 4 years old and living in Ilford, Essex, with her parents and younger brother.
I already knew a lot about her father, Ernest Arthur SEWELL, but not where he was born - until I viewed this census and found he was born in Hethersett, Norfolk, south-west of Norwich.
So my grandmother did have a link with Norfolk after all.
Ernest was 35 in 1901 and my next step was to try to find him as a 15-year-old boy in the 1881 census - which was also on the internet on the Church of Latter Day Saints web site.
Ernest was the oldest son of a Norfolk farmer, Arthur Wellesley SEWELL (no doubt named after the Duke of Wellington).
Arthur was more affluent than I had expected; he had 600 acres, employed 17 men and had five servants. Like his son, he was born in Hethersett, but was now farming at Wood Norton.
What struck me though was that his wife Imogene, my great great grandmother, was born in Burnham Market, Norfolk.
This is one of seven Burnhams in North Norfolk and only a mile or two from the birthplace of Nelson at Burnham Thorpe.
Suddenly, I was in business - not only did I have Norfolk ancestors but they were from a much more affluent background than the rest of my ancestors and there was now a confirmed link to the Burnham villages.
My brother had been following separate leads and had joined a one-name society dedicated to researching the name Sewell and variants (The Sole Society).
The society had a Sewell tree on which Arthur Wellesley Sewell appeared and which went back as far as 1500.
Even more interesting though was the fact that one of Ernest Arthur Sewell's brothers, George, had the middle name 'Nelson'.
So Imogene Sewell from Burnham Market had given the name Nelson to one of her sons. This was getting very interesting.
My next step was to confirm Imogene's maiden name, so I looked for a marriage record on www.1837online.com where the references for births, marriages and deaths in England since 1837 are available to search.
I estimated that they probably got married about a year before their first child was born in 1865. Very quickly, I had a hit - Arthur Wellesley Sewell was married in Docking district (this includes the Burnhams) in August 1864.
Grandmother had also vaguely remembered the name Anderson on this line. I followed a hunch and looked for a matching Anderson marriage reference and found Imogene Hephzibah Anderson's marriage reference number matched Arthur Sewell.
In 1881 Imogene was 42 years old so I needed to find her in the 1851 census where she ought to be with her parents.
Once again my luck held out as some years before the LDS had published the 1851 census on CD for three counties - Devon, Warwickshire and Norfolk.
I sent off for the disc and spent a couple of days waiting for it to arrive. Strangely, it was with some trepidation that I finally sat in front of my computer with the disc. What if I couldn't find her?
I typed 'Imogene Anderson' into the search box. There was only one match and the age matched perfectly as did the location in the Docking district.
I clicked the 'Household' link to find out who she was living with.
I was now convinced the more well-off my ancestors were then the more likely there was to be a link with Nelson.
I checked her father's details: “William Anderson, Shoemaker emp 7 men”, and then my wife exclaimed: “There are Nelsons living there!”
In the same household were the wife's father and mother, Nathaniel Nelson and Esther Nelson. Nathaniel's birthplace, in 1795, was Burnham Thorpe.
So, I had Nelson ancestors from the same Norfolk village as Admiral Nelson himself!
A dimly remembered 'link' passed down the generations, passed on to mine in the mid 1970s and re-discovered in a dusty old file in the 21st century was becoming something real.
I now had to find out if this Nathaniel Nelson was related to Lord Nelson's family. I knew there could be no direct line; Nelson had no sons and descendants via his daughter Horatia are well documented.
But could there be a link to some other branch of Nelson's family? Nathaniel was listed as a miller in the 1851 census, surely too humble an occupation for a relative of Lord Nelson.
But Burnham Thorpe was a tiny place. Was it possible that there were two entirely separate Nelson families from the village?
Horatio Nelson's family had not had a long history in Burnham Thorpe. Nelson's father Edmund had come there as rector in 1755 but the family had come from the Swaffham area for several generations before that.
The only Nelson members of the Admiral's family who would have been in the village in the 1790s would surely have all been related to Edmund himself and therefore almost certainly too closely related not to be known about in history books.
Furthermore, after Edmund Nelson died there were no real family links with the village (evenNelson's birthplace was knocked down in his lifetime) although his daughter, Horatia, did live in Burnham Market later on.
On the other hand Nelson lived in Burnham Thorpe and farmed his father's land between 1787 and 1792 during his five years on the beach on half pay.
The biggest clue came from a general search of the internet.
This unearthed a short article on the Eastern Daily Press web site that began “Burnham Thorpe produced two seafaring Horatio Nelsons...” and gave details of the story of another Horatio Nelson who had been born in Burnham Thorpe in 1793.
This one had been a Midshipman in the Royal Navy who died suddenly while on sick leave ashore and was buried in Fahan in Ireland in 1811.
The late Cecil J Isaacson, formerly the rector of Burnham Thorpe, had told his story in a booklet published in 1991.
Here then was evidence that there was indeed another Nelson family in Burnham Thorpe producing children in the 1790s.
Surely, this family was far more likely to be the one to which my Nathaniel belonged?
I had to get hold of a copy of the Isaacson booklet so I did a search on the Amazon web site.
I was incredibly lucky since there was one copy for sale from a second hand book dealer priced at £2.99. An agonizing wait ensued but two days later I had the booklet in my hands.
The full title is “Nelson's Five Years on the Beach and the Other 'Horatio' Nelson of Burnham Thorpe”.
It is a curious feeling when you read an account of some of your ancestors' history in a book.
The Reverend Isaacson's work turned out to be divided neatly into two parts - half was about the then Captain Nelson and his time in Burnham Thorpe between 1787 and 1792 and the other half was about my Nelson ancestors from the same village.
It turns out that my 4xgreat grandfather, Nathaniel Nelson, was born in 1791 in Burnham Thorpe to Robert Nelson and Catherine Duffield.
They had six other children born in the village, three of whom died young.
Nathaniel's younger brother, Thomas, had joined the Royal Navy a few years after Trafalgar and had become a full Midshipman by the time he died in 1811 in Ireland whilst serving on board HMS Endymion.
At some point in his naval career he acquired the name 'Horatio' no doubt because of his common name and birthplace with the most famous son of Burnham Thorpe.
Thomas was obviously well thought of because the Captain of the Endymion, Sir William Bolton (Nelson's nephew by marriage), paid for a fine gravestone:
One of the Rev Isaacson's aims was to find out if there was any link between the two Nelson families in Burnham Thorpe.
As Rector he had easy access to the registers where he found what appears to be evidence there was no genetic link between the families.
Nelson's older brother William had acted as assistant to his father Edmund for some time.
At some point (it seems likely to have been after his brother became famous) he went back to the first page on which the baptism details of a child of Robert and Catherine Nelson appears and wrote this note:
“Please to observe that Joseph Duffield and the other Children of Robert Nelson and Catherine his wife, are no Relations whatever, to the Family of the Revd Edmund Nelson, Rector of this Parish.” (See panel opposite)
I don't have any reason to doubt this conclusion. Nelson's family tree makes no mention of any names in my Nelson tree.
It is highly unlikely that relatives of Nelson living in Burnham Thorpe at the same time as him would have escaped any mention in the innumerable biographies of the Admiral.
Although Robert Nelson served on the parish council, was a village overseer, and was known to have had at least one servant, the two Nelson families would certainly have moved in very different social circles (after all, Nelson's mother had been related to the family of former Prime Minster, Sir Robert Walpole).
But, did my Robert Nelson and Horatio Nelson actually know each other? Was the family legend of a 'link' anything more than just the coincidence of the common surname and the village of Burnham Thorpe?
I'll probably never know. However, the men were about the same age, shared the same name, lived in the same tiny village at the same time for several years.
It is perhaps not too unlikely to imagine them discussing farming matters over a pint or two in the only pub in Burnham Thorpe, The Plough (now inevitably renamed The Lord Nelson).
Perhaps Sir William Bolton's later patronage and kind treatment of Thomas Nelson was a result of the two families being known to each other. As I say, I will probably never know.
The Reverend's booklet has some wonderful details on Nathaniel Nelson.
I knew he had been a miller from the 1851 census but I was delighted to find a wonderful picture of his mill at Burnham Overy Staithe and to discover that he had owned the little row of cottages in New Road which are still known as the Post Mill Cottages.
Looking back at this research, perhaps the most amazing thing to me is that it was all, with the exception of one telephone call, conducted on the internet and it all led from a few basic facts I knew about my grandmother.
The time that elapsed between me checking her entry on the 1901 census and holding the Isaacson booklet in my hands was exactly three weeks.
Here then is an excellent example of what you can achieve in genealogy these days without getting up from your desk.
Since then I have visited Burnham Thorpe, stood in the church where the famous Nelson and my Nathaniel were christened and sat on the very same high backed benches in the village pub that were in use over 200 years ago.
I also found the house in Burnham Market where Nathaniel was living at the time of the 1851 census and was even invited to have a look around the Post Mill Cottages at Overy Staithe when the owner spotted me looking at them from across the road.
The internet is a wonderful research tool but there is nothing like a field visit to really bring your family history to life. |
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