Sidney Alfred Parsons and his Ancestors

Jane Smith previously Vincent née Parsons (1836 to 1881)

Jane was an aunt of Sidney Parsons’. Her brother John was Sidney’s father and John was the present author’s great-grandfather.

Jane’s parents were Edward Parsons and his wife Elizabeth (née Taylor) who lived in the village of Marston Magna in the south-eastern corner of the county of Somerset. She was baptised on the 27th of March 1836 and she was named after her baby sister Jane who had died three and a half years earlier.

Her father was an agricultural labourer who was the eldest son of a moderately wealthy farmer Charles Parsons who lived at Manor Farm in the village but when Charles died in 1846 Edward did not receive a legacy.

Jane stayed in Marston Magna until she was 23 years old but then, at the end of May 1859, she got married. The wedding was in Thornford in Dorset. Witnesses included Jane’s brother Isaac and their friend Jane Cupper whom Isaac would later marry.

Luke came from Thornford; his father John was the innkeeper of the King’s Arms and Luke worked as a carpenter, smith, and wheewright.


The village of Thornford in Dorset, marked with a T on the map, is about four miles south-east of Yeovil. Marston Magna, Jane’s home, is marked with an M.

The entry for Thornford in the 1848 publication by Samuel Lewis A Topographical Dictionary of England reads:

“THORNFORD (St. Mary Magdalene), a parish, in the union and hundred of Sherborne, Sherborne division of Dorset, 3 miles (S. W.) from Sherborne; containing 394 inhabitants, and comprising 1300 acres. The road from Sherborne to Evershot runs through the parish. The living is a discharged rectory, valued in the king’s books at £6. 17. 3.; net income, £200; patron, Earl Digby: the glebe contains about 28 acres, with a house. The church was anciently a chapel dependent on Sherborne Abbey. The Wesleyans have a place of worship.”

Jane and her husband Luke lived in Thornford and their two children, Jane and Luke, were born there the year after they married, but sadly their baby daughter Jane died later that year. They seemed to have a good lifestyle. Luke had three apprentices, one of whom was John Willis, the son of Jane’s widowed aunt Harriet, and he and Jane had a maidservant. In 1865 he exhibited at the village flower show and won a prize for his turnips.

Despite their apparently settled life in the village they had troubles. At the end of 1867 Luke was summoned to a meeting of his creditors in Yeovil and soon afterwards he was declared bankrupt. And the following year Luke died — the cause was said to be “Diseased lungs”. He was 31 years old.

After her husband died Jane probably went to live with her sister Elizabeth and her husband William Sly who kept a pub in Southampton. Jane’s younger brother John moved there from Marston Magna at about the same time. A few years later Jane married again.

Jane’s second husband, Mark Smith, was a widower. He had been born in Wiltshire and had married his first wife, Ann Rattue, there. In around 1850 they had moved to Southampton where he worked as a coal porter. But Ann died leaving him with two of their children to look after (there had been four - it is unclear what happened to two youngest). In 1869 Jane married Mark in Southampton.

Mark and Jane soon left Southampton. They moved to Ipswich in Suffolk with Mark’s two children, Edwin and Elizabeth, who were 18 and 16 years old. Edwin and Elizabeth were also recorded in the 1871 census as living in another house nearby, the home of a young couple called Samuel & Harriett Clarke. Jane’s 11 year old son Luke Vincent was not with them. He was in Thornford with his paternal grandparents John and Maria Vincent. Mark led the enumerator of the census to believe that he was employed as a master mariner, which given his subsequent career seems rather unlikely.

Within ten years Mark and Jane had moved again. They went to Newcastle-upon-Tyne where they lived in Elswick, an industrial and ship-building suburb to the west of the city centre. He worked as a boatman on the River Tyne. Jane’s son Luke had joined them and he had adopted his step-father’s surname Smith but kept Vincent as his middle name. The family had a servant called Sarah Wardhaugh whom young Luke married in 1883. By 1901 Jane’s husband Mark had changed his trade again — he had become a stone and sand merchant. Mark’s son Edwin Smith continued to live with them.

Mark died in 1903. Jane’s whereabouts after then have not been established — Jane Smith is a very common name and there are many people with that name in the areas where she might have chosen to live. In 1921 Mark’s son Edwin was still living in Elswick. He never married.

Jane’s children

Jane’s two children were probably twins. They were both baptised in Thornford on the 17th of February 1860. But baby Jane died when she was only about ten months old. She was buried in Thornford on the 4th of December.

Young Luke was just eight years old when his father died. He might have accompanied his mother when she went to Southampton to live with her sister Elizabeth but it is more probable that he stayed with his grandfather and grandmother John and Maria Vincent in Thornford. He was recorded as being with them in the 1871 census, as was his Uncle George Vincent and his wife and family.

By 1881 Luke had joined his mother and step-father Jane Mark Smith in Newcastle. He was recorded with the surname Smith but with Vincent as his middle name. In subsequent censuses the Smith surname had been dropped.

In 1883, on the 6th of June Luke married his parents’ housemaid, a local girl called Sarah Wardhaugh, and they went to live in Luke’s home village in Dorset, Thornford, where he found work as an agricultural labourer.

Luke and Sarah’s five children were born in Thornford. They were: William John (b.1883), George Frederick (b.1885), Maria (b.1887), Jane (b.1889), and Mark (b.1896). Sadly young Jane died some time around her second birthday.

Sarah fell ill with pulmonary tuburculosis and on the 5th of April 1900, when she was only 36 years old, she died.

After Sarah died Luke decided to leave Thornford. He moved far away, to Thirsk in the North Riding of Yorkshire, taking his four children with him. At first he worked as a carter but later he became a farm foreman. He lived in Thirsk for nearly 40 years and died there in March 1940.

Luke’s eldest child, William John Vincent joined the Royal Navy a year after his mother died. He signed on for twelve years but was discharged after only a few months; his record notes that his character was “bad”. He returned to Yorkshire and worked as a farm labourer. In 1910 he married Mary Agnes Ashby and they lived in Oulston in North Yorkshire. William died in 1919. Luke’s second child, George Frederick Vincent, became a Railway Signalman, married a girl called Ethel Moss, and eventually settled in Stockton in County Durham. Luke’s daughter Maria married a motor mechanic called Ernest Gascoyne. She and Ernest lived with Luke until he died and afterwards continued to live in the same house in Chapel Street in Thirsk. Luke’s youngest child, Mark, became a farm worker. In 1926 he married a girl called Maud Smith but, nine years after they married, she died. In 1939 Mark was living in his father’s old house with his sister Maria. He died in Thirsk in 1968.

Ancestors of Jane Smith previously Vincent née Parsons


Parents
Father — Edward Parsons, a gamekeeper, farm labourer and gardener from Marston Magna in Somerset
Mother — Elizabeth Parsons née Taylor

Grandparents
Grandfather — Charles Parsons, a wealthy farmer in Marston Magna
Grandmother — Ann Parsons née Jukes

Grandfather — John Taylor, the village baker in Marston Magna
Grandmother — Rosanna Taylor née Bond, who had been born in High Ham in Somerset

Great-grandparents
Great-grandfather — William Parsons, a publican and landowner who lived in Holton in Somerset, but had been born in Kington Magna in Dorset
Great-grandmother — Mary Parsons née West, baptised in 1753, the daughter of a farmer from Stowell in Somerset

Great-grandfather — Giles Jukes, who came from a village near Gillingham in Dorset
Great-grandmother — Elizabeth Jukes née Hill

Great-grandfather — Charles Taylor, who was born in Somerton in Somerset but lived most of his life in High Ham
Great-grandmother — Catherine Tucker, who came from High Ham in Somerset

Great-grandfather — John Bond, who came from High Ham which is near Langport in Somerset
Great-grandmother — Anne Bond née Read



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You are free to make use of the information in these web pages in any way that you wish but please be aware that the author, Mike Parsons, is unable to accept respsonsibility for any errors or omissions.

Mike can be contacted at parsonspublic@gmail.com

The information in these web pages comes from a number of sources including: Hampshire County Records Office, Somerset Heritage Centre; Dorset County Records Office; Southampton City Archives; the General Register Office; several on-line newspaper archives; several on-line transcriptions of Parish Register Entries; and several on-line indexes of births, marriages and deaths. The research has also been guided at times by the published work of others, both on-line and in the form of printed books, and by information from personal correspondence with other researchers, for all of which thanks are given. However, all of the information in these web pages has been independently verified by the author from original sources, facimile copies, or, in the case of a few parish register entries, transcriptions published by on-line genealogy sites. The author is aware that some other researchers have in some cases drawn different conclusions and have published information which is at variance from that shown in these web pages.