Facebook post #024 (Jul 2020)
‘Weaver’ is not a trade name – in Britain, that is Webb. Rather, the name is thought to derive from the River Weaver in Cheshire. Pictured is the church at Weaverham, possibly the centre of the universe… before it shifted to Sutton Coldfield. The C15 Thomas De Wever sounds quite grand but in Sutton (C18-C19), we were agricultural labourers, living in ‘Blabbs’ – which seem to have been a group of shacks named after the sound of the brook running past.
My 3rd gt-grandmother Rebecca can’t have had an easy life – she seems to have fallen out with her father (who ended his days in the Aston Union Workhouse), and was a domestic servant from the age of 12. She never revealed the father of her son. However, she met a good man, who took them both in, and she lived until the age of 95. My grandad’s sister remembered her well and was therefore able to pass on mid-C19 reminscences of the time long before cars! Her son worked his way up to head gardener at Middleton Hall (pictured) near Tamworth, which is now (normally) open to the public.
His children did well, and remained in the Sutton area. But the big surprise has been the number of coal miners in the family that have shown up in the research. There were small coal seams around Tamworth and West Bromwich, but the family followed the work to the West Yorkshire coalfield, and, by 1939, many of Rebecca’s brother’s descendants were to be found in the Wakefield area. Others remained in the industrial West Midlands – including Small Heath of ‘Peaky Blinders’ fame, or emigrated. The Barnes family remained well-off farmers in Staffordshire. One family member was an engine driver, another wrote a book on satire! (Use the menu to find the family pages).
