Sidney Alfred Parsons and his Ancestors

William Trim (born 1850)

William Trim’s connection to the Parsons Family was through his wife Jane Cupper. William was Jane’s second husband and her first husband Isaac Parsons had been an uncle of Sidney Parsons, the person who is at the root of the family tree described in this series of web pages.


William Trim was born in December 1850 in Kington Magna, a village in North Dorset overlooking the Blackmore Vale. Coincidently it had also been the home of Richard Parsons, the earliest known ancestor of Sidney Parsons to bear the Parsons name. Richard Parsons had been born there during the Civil War and two hundred years later, when William Trim was born, the Parsons family still owned land in the parish.

William was baptised at the parish church in February 1851. His father James worked as a coal-carrier and also did a little farming. At the time William was born James had just 15 acres of land. William was the second of James’ seven children the last of whom, Mary Ann, was born in 1859. James had also been born in Kington Magna and he spent his whole life there. William’s mother Fanny (whose maiden name was Ridout) had been born in neighbouring West Stour.

He grew up with his parents but by the time he was 21 years old he had left home and was lodging with John Mead and his wife. John was a tailor and also a grocer (one of two in Kington Magna). At that time William worked as an agricultural labourer but later he became an indoor servant and by the time he was 30 years old he had risen in status to become a butler.

In 1880, when he married, William was living and working as a butler in Melcombe Regis, a part of Weymouth, on the Dorset coast more than 30 miles south of Kington Magna.

The woman whom William Trim married was a widow called Jane Parsons. She had been born in Marston Magna in Somerset and she had married Isaac Parsons there. Jane had two children with Isaac but then, in about 1865, they separated. Jane moved to Weymouth where she found work as a lady’s maid to an elderly widow. Her husband Isaac became a publican in Southampton. Ten years later, on Christmas day in 1875, Isaac died of liver disease in his brother’s pub.

William Trim married Jane Parsons in Melcombe Regis on the 14th of December 1880. He was about six years younger than her. Jane and William had known each other for several years before they married. Three years earlier Jane had been a guest at William’s brother Tom’s wedding in Kington Magna and she and William were witnesses.

In the early years of William and Jane’s marriage they lived with her parents John and Ellen Cupper who had moved to Weymouth from their home in Marston Magna. By then both of Jane’s children were making their own way in the world and had left home. Six months later Jane’s mother Ellen died. And three years after that so did her father John.

William and Jane had no children. They became keepers of a boarding house in Melcombe Regis where they remained for many years. The address was number 8 Royal Terrace.

At the end of 1901 Jane’s son Louis Parsons came to live in Weymouth. Her other son lived in Yeovil. Louis had been a seaman in the Royal Navy but he became unwell and was discharged. He married and had a child but in June 1905 he died after which his widow Marion and son Cecil lived with William and Jane in their boarding house.

William’s whereabouts after 1911 are not known but Jane died in Melcombe Regis in 1925.

William Trim’s ancestors


William’s earliest known ancestors were:

•  John Trim, who was born in Gillingham in 1765 but lived for most of his life in Kington Magna.

•  Thomas Blackmoor, who spent his whole life in Kington Magna.

•  Mary Hooper, Thomas’ wife, who was born in Buckhorn Weston. She married him in Cann, near Shaftesbury, in 1753.

•  Phillip Ridout, who was born, lived and died in West Stour in Dorset.

•  William Metyard, who was born in Stour Provost in Dorset in 1746. His second wife, Ann Blackmore, was a sister of William Trim’s grandmother Jane Blackmore.

•  Frances, William Metyard’s first wife, who died in 1782 when her daughter Frances was only about four years old.

William Trim’s parents James Trim and Fanny Ridout

William’s father James Trim was born in Kington Magna in 1807 and lived there all his life.

James’ parents were John Trim and his wife Jane (née Blackmore) and James was the eighth of their nine children. James’s mother Jane was was from Kington Magna but John originally came from Gillingham, about five miles away. After John married Jane in 1787 he made his life in Kington Magna. John and Jane’s first child, Martha, was born in 1788 nearly nineteen years before James who was baptised on the 3rd of January 1807.

It was a poor family. Although John sometimes supplemented the money he earnt as a labourer by renting fields to grow potatoes, there were occasions when he was forced to rely on some help from parish funds. In 1808, the year after James was born, two Justices of the Peace examined the family to try and determine which parish, Kington Magna, or Gillingham, should be responsible for them should they fall on hard times. The family stayed in Kington Magna.

When James was about 18 years old his father died. James continued to live with with his mother for another twenty years until, at the age of 38, he married. His wife was Fanny Ridout a 32 year old woman from West Stour, a village which lies just to the east of Kington Magna. Their wedding was in West Stour on the 5th of May 1845. The couple lived in Kington Magna where James worked as a coal carrier and small farmer.

Their first child, James, was born in 1848. William, their second, in 1850 and their seventh and last, who was called Mary Ann, was born in 1859.

James and Fanny and their children lived in the part of Kington Magna called New Town. His brother Thomas and his wife Mary lived next door. In the 1851 census Thomas was described as a pauper and a shepherd.

By 1871 their children had left home except for Harry and Mary Ann.

James died in January 1876 and was buried in Kington Magna. His widow Fanny eventually went to live with her daughter Frances Keynes, whose husband had also died, until 1892 when she died and was buried in Kington Magna.

James and Fanny Trim’s children

  •  James — James and Fanny’s first child was baptised on the 5th of June 1848 and lived with his parents until he was about 20 years old when he emigrated to the United States where became a farmer in Ontario, New York State. He married a Canadian woman called Mary Shannon and they had three children, Jennie, Henry and Inez. James died on New Year’s Eve in 1907.

  •  William — whose life is descibed above.

  •  Frances — was born in about 1850. By the time she was 21 years old she was working as a servant in Marylebone in London. She eventually got married in London, at St Michael and All Angels, Bromley, to a seaman called George Keynes who had originally come from Dorset. Frances lived in a shared house in London while George was away at sea and their first two children were born there. But their third child was born in Frances’ home village, Kington Magna. Some time in the mid 1880s Frances’s husband George died and after that she returned to Marston Magna. Eventually Frances went to live in Portsmouth with her daughter Lilian whose husband worked at the Naval dockyard there. Frances died in Portsmouth in 1937.

  •  Thomas — Tom Trim was baptised in April 1855. In 1877, a year after his father died, he married Emily Coombes in Kington Magna. Tom worked as a gardener in Kington Magna for a while and the couple lived next door to Emily’s parents. But a few years later the family moved to a village near Pontypridd in Wales where Tom worked in a colliery. Emily died there in 1915 and Tom died five years later.

  •  Harry — James and Fanny’s son Harry was born in about 1855. When he was about 17 years old he emigrated to the United States travelling steerage from Liverpool to New York. Once there he lived with his brother James who was a farmer in upstate New York.

  •  George — was born in March 1857 and was baptised on the 11th of that month. Nine days later he was buried.

  •  Mary Ann — James and Fanny’s last child, Mary Ann Trim, was baptised in Kington Magna on the 3rd of April 1859. She lived with her parents until she reached her teenage years after which nothing more is known of her.



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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.