Category: Rawlinson

Publishing Pedigrees


I’ve been doing some thinking about how best to publish a pedigree chart that would show the relationships between the various people I’ve mentioned to date and myself, and I admit this is where my newbie status as a blogger shows itself.  Indeed, this might be where it would be better to use a regular website and not a service like WordPress, which for all its power doesn’t seem to be very friendly to uploading formatted text, unless one is something of an expert with cascading style sheets and so forth.  I’m not, and nor do I really have a desire to be; I’m here to research and write, not spend all my time figuring out how to publish pretty pictures.  So, for those wanting to see a fancy chart, I’ll get there, but meanwhile I’ll have to resort to the old-fashioned descriptive text.

Of course, other genealogists (and genealogy bloggers) whose work I’ve followed seem to be of two minds about whether to even publish such charts in the first place.  For one thing, it seems there’s a trend toward “genealogy theft”, i.e. people simply lift the result of all your hard work and graft it onto their own family trees, for whatever reason I can’t quite fathom.  Why anyone not related to me would want to put my ancestors in their family tree is beyond me, but apparently it happens.  I suppose if I manage to somehow, some day, uncover the missing link between myself and some famous historical personage, it could be tempting for someone else with a family name appearing in my tree to “attach” themselves to that famous person.  It might look very impressive to their friends, but it wouldn’t be true.  Ah well, at this point I’ve not uncovered any such famous ancestors (well, maybe locally famous, but not such that they’d have a Wikipedia page or something).

Belay that last.  As I wrote that, I thought to myself, hmm, well, there is a line of ancestors on my father’s mother’s mother’s side that had a fair bit of money in the 19th century, a landed estate in England, and even a (rare) book* about them.  Perhaps I should check.  Wouldn’t you know it, my great-great-grandfather’s younger brother has his own Wikipedia entry after all.  It seems that 3x-great-uncle William Hamilton Yatman (1819-1913) was moderately famous for his feats as a rower while at Cambridge.  That, and a property he once owned is today a second home for Prince Charles.

Ok, maybe someone might want to lay claim to some of this line after all.  On the other hand, the Yatman family pedigree, at least as far as it went a hundred years ago, is well known, so anything I publish is not exactly going to be news.

Anyway, back to the original point, which was pedigrees for those mentioned so far — and yes, I realize I’ve now mentioned another one in this post.  In fact, let’s start with him.

William Hamilton Yatman (1819-1913) was the younger brother to John Augustus Yatman (1817-1894), about whom I will later have more to write.  John Augustus (or J.A.Y. as he sometimes signed papers) and his wife Anna Victoria Blachley Turner (1837-1922) had seven children, the eldest of whom was Frances Mary Yatman (1860-1949).  Frances (“Gran” to my father) married William Henry Statter (1857-1895), with whom she had three children.  She married again after William’s death (a Turner, but no relation to Anna Victoria as far as I can tell) and had two more children.  The youngest of her children by her first marriage was Gladys Annie Dinah Statter (1885-1980), affectionately known as “Nin” to those of us who knew her (she hated the name Gladys).  So far this has been an entirely English family, but Gladys married a New Zealander, John Fraser (1894-1964), and emigrated back to his country with him.  John and Gladys had six children (five who lived to adulthood), second eldest of whom was Robert William Campbell Fraser (1921-present day), my father.

In an earlier post about names, I introduced Alexander Fraser (1802-?) and his wife Grace Campbell (1811-?), residents of Perthshire, Scotland.  Alexander and Grace had ten children, second eldest of whom was Robert Campbell Fraser (1838-1905), who emigrated to New Zealand for reasons not yet known to me.  There he married a Kiwi girl, Sarah Ann Cliffe (1864-1936), and had eight children, four (or maybe five — I haven’t been able to track down what happened with one of the daughters) who lived to adulthood.  Third eldest of those living that long was my grandfather, John Fraser, the one who married Gladys of the Statter/Yatman family.

In The Voyage of the Adamant I introduced James Spratt (1844-1935) and his wife Maria Rawlinson (1844-1909), who emigrated from England to New Zealand.  See Emigrants to connect from the Spratts to me through my mother’s line.

* A History of Winscombe Hill and the Yatman Family, by Maria Forbes, published 2005, appears to be a very limited run.  I have found exactly one copy for sale, used, and the seller is asking for more than $300.  It might have to wait.  I have a few tantalizing photocopied pages sent me by my uncle which I believe are from this book, and which show my great-grandmother Frances and great-grandfather William at the time of their marriage.  I think the author wrote the book specifically for one modern descendant of the Yatmans, Sue Gunn, to whom it is dedicated, and who I believe may have been the last private owner of the family estate at Winscombe Hall.

Emigrants


Earlier I recounted a story of the emigrant ship Adamant on her 1875 voyage from England to New Zealand, but I didn’t give much detail about my connection to that ship.  The Adamant brought the Spratt family, of Liverpool, to New Zealand, where they settled in Invercargill, one of the most southern cities.  James and Maria Spratt (nee Rawlinson), both 31 years old, and four children, Maria (who turned 12 and became a “single woman” during the voyage), Elizabeth, Ada, and Harriet, all set out for a brave new world, leaving behind the life they had known.  James opened a shop in Invercargill as a sailmaker and cloth worker, and he and Maria had four more children after arriving in the new country.  One of these, Florence, born almost exactly four years after arrival, would become my great-grandmother.  James would live to the age of 90, and Maria to 65.

In 1905, at the age of 25, Florence Spratt married John Crabbe Winning, another native-born New Zealander of Scottish parents, moving their family slightly north to live in Dunedin, Waimate, and Timaru.  John was a butcher, and then a stationer, by trade, with a fancy goods shop in Waimate.  The both of them enjoyed singing, composing their own songs and performing in an orchestra.  They had two children, the elder of whom, Dulcie Rawlinson Winning, was my grandmother.  Florence would live to the age of 68, and John to 87.

Dulcie, born in 1908, at the age of 20 married a Christchurch man, John Charles Hargreaves, another native New Zealander born of English parents who would take her north to his town.  There they would have a daughter, Judith, who would later become my mother.  The family later moved to Wellington on the North Island, where John would rise to the position of managing director of a large department store, Kirkcaldie and Stains.  Unfortunately, Dulcie did not live a long life, passing away at the age of 47, and John went on to marry twice more, eventually being survived by his third wife when he died at the age of 84.

A year before her mother’s death, my mother married a dashing sailor, a merchant marine officer by the name of Robert Fraser from an Auckland family, and Auckland is where they chose to live, until 1969 when they emigrated to the United States with four children, one of whom was — me.