What the records, family stories and DNA tells us about the families from Lincolnshire, Rutland and Northamptonshire.
The map of the area is below.
To start this look at the families from Lincolnshire and around with my grandmother Elizabeth Ann Smith. She was born in Market Deeping, Lincolnshire in February 1875 and was the eldest daughter of Philip Smith and Ann Todd of which more later. Her mother died in 1887 after having 8 children. Elizabeth then was recorded as the housekeeper for her father in the 1891 census. Sometime after that she and her sister Martha worked for the Marston family of brewers as housemaids. They then moved with the Walter Marston to Poole when the Marston family acquired the old Dolphin Brewery.
Phillip then married Ann Harvey, the domestic servant of the Rev. Frederick Tryon who was the preacher and founder of the 'Cave Adullam' Church. She was a spinster, 12 years older than her husband and, according to family legend, she was an unpleasant step-mother and the cause of the children leaving home when they could. She died in 1897 though and Philip married again, to another spinster, Clara Hack in 1904.
Clara appears in many photos and was called Grandma by my mother. My mother said she was always kind and pleasant on holiday visits to their house in Market Deeping and outlived Philip by 20 years. They also would come to Poole for holidays. Of her grandfather she said he was very religious, a big man with white hair and beard, a strict Baptist and he used to lead the hymns in the chapel on Sundays.
However Philip Smith seems to acquired his religious attitutes at some time past middle age, perhaps as a result of the early death of his first wife Ann Todd, age 55 of cancer. The Todd family came from Northamptonshire to Market Deeping where Ann was born, the middle of 5 children. Like many young women her first employment was as a domestic servant, a kitchen maid at age 15. Philip and Ann, age 19, were married in a Registry Office at Whitby, Yorkshire and so some 120 miles north of their home town while staying with Philip's uncle; also Philip.
The youngest son, Stephen Smith, left home and emigrated to Canada in 1906. In the 1901 census he worked for his father as a coal hawker, while his sister Ruth was acting as housekeeper just before she married, and the other children had left home. I don't know if he had a contact, but he took up land near Winnipeg before enlisting in the Canadian Army in WW1. After the war, and before returning to Canada he married Mary Ann Shotbolt who lived in Bourne, north of Market Deeping and they returned to Winnipeg in October 1919.
Revised April 2025