2/52 My Best Find: Ann Jane Roberts

 My Best Find: 2:52

 Ann Jane Roberts 1853-1910.

Samual Roberts and Jane Morris are both very common names in Wales and it is difficult to be sure if I have the right ones. Was Samual an ag lab? a man servant? a warehouseman? Or all of these at various times? Did he move to Liverpool in 1841 and return to marry Jane in Abergeli, Conwy?  Did Jane and Sam Roberts move from Wales to Liverpool to make a better living in 1851 with their seven year old girl, Elenor? It is a characteristic of this side of the family to be shifting house, shifting jobs and to be generally unsettled. Was it a hand to mouth existence? Either way, their second child, Mary was born in 1851, after the census had been taken and a third child, Ann Jane was born in 1853.  

Ann Jane Roberts was my great grandmother. She was a great discovery because my grandmother never spoke of her. I didn’t know I had Welsh ancestry and it is thrilling to learn that. She had a complicated life and it took a lot of detective work and cunning to sort it all out. I am still plagued with doubts and confusions. But this is as much as I can make out. 

When Ann Jane Roberts was only two her father died. Jane (née Morris) Roberts was pregnant with her forth child and thirty nine years old so she packed up and went home to her dad. Robert was born at Holyhead, Anglesea. They only just made it or perhaps he was born on the ship? 

The next ten years were spent in Conwy. In 1861, Elenor, aged 17, was earning her way as a dressmaker in Liverpool. Jane and her younger daughters, Mary and Ann, and 6 year old Robert were all living with their grandfather, Edward Morris, a coal merchant. He seems to have done all right for himself and they had a house servant lodging in the house, unless she was more than that? A 56 year old widow and a widower? Who can say? Edward died in 1863 and Jane was the executor of his will. He left less than £100.

Perhaps Ann stayed in Wales when her mother moved back to Liverpool. She may have worked as a domestic servant, a job that women in this family took up again and again. What else was there? 

Well, there was marriage and 1873 was a year for them. In January Jane Roberts, aged 57,  a widow who had successfully raised her four children, married Charles Gadd in Liverpool.  In July Ann, 19, married George Johnson. an Irishman from Dublin. Her mother, now Jane Gadd, witnessed the wedding with a cross but both George and Ann could sign their names. George was a joiner. In the next eight years they had three children together, George, Alice and Margaret. But the following year, at aged 32, he was dead. Ann was twenty eight and her children were 5, 3 and 1. What an impossible situation!  

The home of Ann and George Johnson and their children George, Alice and Margaret. 10 Upper Warwick Street, Toxteth Park. Perhaps one of the happier periods of Ann's life. 

Ann’s solution after two years of struggle was to find another man. Perhaps that was the only solution. James Prince was almost ten years younger, 19,  but they lied on their wedding certificate to make her 25 and him 21. Ann took three year old Margaret Johnson with her but the other Johnson children, George and Alice, were probably palmed off to Johnson relations, or maybe Grandma Jane Gadd. Although possibly not as she was again widowed and how would she support herself and two children? 

When Ann married George Johnson her father had been recorded correctly, as Samual Roberts; in 1873 when she married George her mother’s marriage to Charles Gadd was only 6 months old but when she married James Prince, her father was recorded as Charles Gadd: by 1884, Charles Gadd had earned the right to be recorded as her father, although he had died two years earlier in 1882.

Ann’s new husband, Edward James Prince, was the oldest son of eleven children. He had many different jobs. In 1881, aged 16,  he was helping his dad at the family business of firework making. When he got married to Ann in 1884 he is said to be a coachman. In 1891 he was recorded as a butcher. In 1909 when his daughter married, although he had died by then, he is listed as a ‘gun powder maker’ which was perhaps another way of saying ‘firework making’. His younger brothers continued in that trade. 

Ann and James had 4 girls: Annie Eliza, Edith Maud, Jane and Louisa Ann. They were born in quick succession : 1884,1886, 1887 and 1889.

Annie Eliza Prince was Grandma. She passed down oral history to us. I was told, by my dad, that she was ‘dragged up in the gutter’. She ran away from home when she was 14. My grandmother was taken under the wing of a woman called Florence and when she saw the bruises on Annie’s body, she went around to Annie’s parents and gave them a piece of her mind. My grandma named one of her daughters Florence.

I was told that James and Ann drank. Apparently, according to my cousin who heard it from Grandma, the girls’ job was to go to the pub and bring back a jug of beer. Were James and/or Ann alcoholics? It’s hard to know because Grandma and her sister, Jane, both became staunch Wesleyan Methodists and teetotallers. I think Florence played a part in that. Any consumption of alcohol was wicked. 

All the girls left home young and went into service. Grandma at 14, Edith was working as a domestic servant at 15. I think we can safely conclude that it was a dysfunctional family, certainly impoverished. 

James Prince died in 1899 at the age of 34. Ann died in 1910. She was 56. Annie and Jane (Aunty Ginny, ‘Janey’ in a Lancashire accent, at least to our Australian ears,) moved to Australia five years later in 1915. They both carried their mother’s name (Ann Jane) but they never spoke of her. 

Ann Jane Roberts had a sad life. Her father died when she was a baby. She married twice, both husbands dying in their thirties. She had seven children, but gave up the two eldest to marry James Prince, Then she lost Annie when she ran away, possibly because of James’ violence and drinking. I want to put my arms around Ann and tell her that it wasn’t her fault. I wish I had known her and that life hadn’t dealt her such hard cards. 

References

English Census, 1841, 1851, 1861, 1881, 1891

England & Scotland Select Cemetery Registers, 1800 - 2016. Liverpool Record Office Liverpool, Merseyside, England. 

Liverpool, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1813 -1921 and 1754 -1935. Liverpool Record Office. 

UK and Ireland, Find a Grave Index 1300s - Current.

UK Outward Passenger Lists 1890 - 1960.

Wales Census 1861 1871,