We know that James Laurie’s obituary on the blog says that he left ‘a numerous family, some of whom are very young’ and the 1871 census shows how true this is. It gives Charlotte’s age as 47, but gets her birth year wrong: this was 1824 not 1822, confirmed by the fact that she died at 80 in 1904.
What we did not know was that her nine surviving children (Merival is still to be found, but we now have Jessie’s place in the family) ranged in age from 18 (John McConnochie, b. 1853) to Elizabeth 3 (b. 1868). In between are Jessie Thomson 17 (b. 1854), Charlotte Laura 14 (called Laura Charlotte on the census, b. 1857), James Alexander 13 (b. 1858, d. 1875), Marion 11 (b. 1860), William Jeffrey 10 (b. 1861), Ann 8 (b. 1863) and Margaret 6 (b. 1865). John and Jessie were born on Alderney, Marion and Margaret on Guernsey; James Alexander as we know was born in Cherbourg in France, but Charlotte Laura was born in Broadclyst in Devon, presumably at Charlotte’s own parents’ home, and Elizabeth in Cardiff. Why this is so is not quite clear, unless she and/or James Laurie had a home there: certainly it was in Cardiff that she set up her millinery and dressmaking business after James Laurie died. William and Ann are missing from the census, presumably because they were away from home when it was taken: we know that Ann lived on to marry Richard Morgan. If William died in the meantime, we have no record of a grave – James Laurie, James Alexander and Charlotte are all buried in the same grave in Capel Martin (now St Martin’s Church) in Caerphilly. Charlotte must have married James in 1852 at the latest, probably on Alderney and certainly not in Calcutta, a confusion that arose because that is where her daughter, Charlotte Laura, married Ernest Hall in 1880; some records further confuse this marriage with an earlier one for Charlotte herself, but she was ‘Charlotte Chamberlain’ and unmarried when, aged 26, she married James Laurie Monfries.
Thanks to Barbara for this update
No comments:
Post a Comment