My Heritage

[ElizabethHerts]

I have Family Historian to record my tree.
It gives hints linked with FMP and it also gives hints for My Heritage.

OH's great-grandfather William Henry Lamb was born in Whitby in 1829. He married a girl from Whitby in 1871 but he is absent from Whitby in 1851 and 1861 and I haven't found him elsewhere in England.

He was a tobacconist and I wondered if he might have gone abroad. His father died of cholera in 1832 and he was in the workhouse for a while. His mother remarried, only to die very painfully in 1851.

I am now getting matches for him through My Heritage :

2 matches for William Henry LAMB

Record Matches (2)
William Lamb
1860 United States Federal Census
Birth: Circa 1830 - Place
Residence: 1860 - Place
Wife (implied): Name of wife
Children (implied): Sarah Lamb and names of 4 more children

Adds: spouse(s) and child(ren)
View record

William Lamb
1870 United States Federal Census
Birth: Circa 1829 - Place
Residence: Day Month 1870 - Place
Wife (implied): Name of wife
Children (implied): Sarah Lamb and names of 6 more children

Adds: spouse(s) and child(ren)


I'm also getting matches from FMP which are exactly the same.

Is anyone able to view these records? I'm useless with American records as I don't use them much at all.




http://www.genealogistsforum.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=4620&highlight=William+Henry+Lamb

[kiterunner]

I would have thought they should be available free on FamilySearch but am having trouble getting the search pages to load at the moment. Will try again later.

[ElizabethHerts]

Thanks for looking, Kate.

[Merry]

The only match I can find on FMP is this one for 1870. Doesn't seem to be your man as he's not born n the UK:

William Lamb Male 41 1829 Missouri
Pegy J Lamb Female 41 1829 Kentucky
Sarah Lamb Female 18 1852 Missouri
Samuel Lamb Male 16 1854 Missouri
Mary Lamb Female 14 1856 Missouri
Henry Lamb Male 12 1858 Missouri
Oldridg Lamb Female 10 1860 Missouri
Newton Lamb Male 8 1862 Missouri
Eler Lamb Female 2 1868 Missouri

[ElizabethHerts]

Thanks for looking, Merry.

When he married in 1871 he stated he was a bachelor, although he could have been lying, of course! He was 41.

[kiterunner]

And this is the 1860 census entry free on FamilySearch, which is for the same family as the 1870:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9BSW-8KY?i=21&cc=1473181

[ElizabethHerts]

Thanks, Kate. I can see no evidence to suggest this is the same William Henry Lamb.

I'll keep looking.

FMP are showing me records for the 1860s of a William H Lamb fighting in the U.S. but again I can't access them.

[kiterunner]

Search on FamilySearch for William H Lamb, "Any" 1860-1870, country United States, military, and I think the records you get back will be the same ones that FMP has.

[kiterunner]

Just looked at my spam emails and found one from My Heritage saying they are giving free access to US military records until 28th May.

[ElizabethHerts]

Thanks, Kate. Again, no evidence at all to suggest it is our man.

[Merry]

There's a merchant seaman's record on FMP dated 1845 for a William Lamb from Whitby :) Ticket 107816.

[ElizabethHerts]

Please could you give me the link, Merry? The men I'm looking at so far aren't correct.

[ElizabethHerts]

I've got him.

https://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=TNA%2FMSEA%2FBTOTH%2F4620615%2F00308&parentid=TNA%2FBT114%2F2131883530%2F1

But no information that enables me to tell whether it's him. I have to be cautious as there was another big Lamb family in Whitby at the same time.

[Merry]

I've not been able to find anything more about that William from other Merchanst Service records.

[ElizabethHerts]

It could well be him. He would have been 16 in 1845 and there was not much for him in Whitby at the time. When he died he owned a lot of shipping property, which I assume it means he owned or part-owned ships.

[Merry]

Is Baxtergate an area in Whitby or a single street? I was just surprised that Charles was living there back around 1830 and William was there in 1871/81 too. Was Charles' wife in Baxtergate during the time William was missing?

[ElizabethHerts]

Baxtergate is one of the main streets in Whitby. There are/were a lot of little "yards" with very poor housing. Some still exist.

Charles Lamb was a Gunsmith but he also supplemented his income by having a pub.


Baines’s Directory of 1823 Whitby Professions and Trades
Miscellany of Trades
Charles Lamb, gun smith, Baxtergate

Pigot’s Directory of 1829 Whitby Professions and Trades
Taverns and Public Houses
Charles Lamb Cross Guns Baxter Gate
Miscellaneous
Charles Lamb gun maker Baxter gate

Charles Lamb
died
Sunday 3rd June 1832
at 6.45 pm
in Abchurch-lane Hospital

Buried 6th June
at St Giles London

After he died of cholera in London in 1832 Sarah tried to keep going. Three of the children, including William, were in the Workhouse in 1841.

1834 Whitby Pigot’s Directory of 1834 Professions and Trades
Taverns and Public Houses
Sarah Lamb Cross Guns Baxter Gate

1837 Poor Law Valuation of Whitby
Baxtergate
Sarah Lamb Ground-floor tenement owned by Anthony Lawson
Rat. value £1-5-0


1841 Census
HO107; 1265; Folio 25; page 12; line 13
Baxtergate Whitby
Sarah Lamb 40 N
James Frank 60 Ag Lab Y
John Frank 20 Mason Y

Some of Sarah’s children were in the Workhouse:

HO107; page 19, line 11
Whitby Union Workhouse
Sarah Lamb 10 Y
William Lamb 11 Y
Adam Lamb 9 Y

1842
Sarah Lamb married Christopher Seaman
1 November 1842 at Whitby
From this certificate we learn that Sarah’s father was Joseph Chambers and a gunsmith.

Sarah remarried in 1842.
1851 Census (30th March)
WHITBY, Yorkshire (North riding)
HO107 piece 2374 folio 386 page 13
Baxtergate Whitby
Cristopher Seaman Head Mar 56 Shoemaker Wisbeach Cambridgeshire
(Northumberland crossed out)
Sarah Wife Mar 55 Birmingham
Adam Lamb Stepson U 19 Shoemaker Yorkshire Whitby


However, Sarah died later in 1851.
Sarah Seaman Died
6 October 1851
at Baxtergate, Whitby
aged 56 years
Wife of Christopher Seaman, Shoemaker
Cause of death:
Uterine disease 2 years
Haemorrhage 6 months
Certified
Informant:
The mark of Hannah Heselton
Present at the death
Baxtergate, Whitby
Registered:
7th October 1851



Baxtergate would have been one of the main centres of trade and shops, I believe.

OH's 1st cousin once removed has recently bought a gun made by Charles Lamb. They do come on the market occasionally.

[ElizabethHerts]

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Baxtergate,+Whitby/@54.4856691,-0.6162957,17.69z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x487f1770483bb9fd:0x590d39550d391 650!8m2!3d54.4857299!4d-0.6155074

[Merry]

Ok, so it was probably purely that the street was popular for tradesmen rather than that the Lamb family were all using the same premises?

[Merry]

Were his siblings as successful?

[ElizabethHerts]

There were 9, possibly 10, children. The first 2 or 3 were born in Birmingham (confusion with the first 2, called Charles - they might be the same baby) and one died at Birmingham and the other, Horatio, in 1831 at Whitby.

James became a Merchant Seaman and I rather lose sight of him, but he might have died at Middlesborough.

Emma Louisa survived and married a chap called Edward Binns. They had 14 children but ended up living apart. She died in Leeds.

Mary, born 1826, died in 1834.

Sarah Susanna, born 1828, married twice. With her first husband, Aaron Harding, she lived at Bishop Auckland. After he died she returned to Whitby and later married James Reed.

Adam Horatio Theophilus (!) was born in 1831. He was a shoemaker for a while but went into the army. He didn't achieve much, never married, and died in Whitby in 1889.

There was a son Edward Edwards Lamb, born posthumously in 1834, so although he had the Lamb name his father wasn't Charles. He died in 1835.


William was therefore the only one really to prosper. His widow Elizabeth married a man 20 years her senior after William's death. He was a prosperous man from the Storm family of Robin's Hood Bay.

[Merry]

Very interesting Elizabeth.

My first reaction was to wonder if William's wife was the reason he was successful! I don't mean that she had money - just that she may have encouraged (pushed?) him to make something of himself.

I have several families in my tree where one child is significantly more successful (at least financially) than the others. Unlike your husband, I'm always descended from one of the other children!!

[ElizabethHerts]

That's an interesting question, Merry.

I have always thought that William "made something of himself" during his absence from Whitby, probably abroad. He was already 41 when he married Elizabeth in 1871, the same year as the census. I don't know when he reappeared at Whitby, but he was a "Master Tobacconist" which implies some degree of knowledge and training.

Elizabeth was 31 when she married. Her father was a cordwainer, and her brothers did moderately well. Two of Elizabeth's brothers were executors of William Lamb's will, along with her. As William died in 1881 they were only married 10 years. Only one son, another William Henry, survived. A daughter Sarah died as an infant.

The Lamb family were never wealthy, but in Huntingdon they had a reasonably comfortable life and are well documented there. William Henry's great-grandmother inherited land in Wales through her sister (subject of a Chancery case). Charles Lamb was apprenticed to a gunsmith, probably in Birmingham, where his wife Sarah Chambers was born. We know from her second marriage in 1842 that her father Joseph Chambers was a gunsmith too. There is a Chambers family of gunsmiths in Birmingham.


The gross amount of William's personal estate was £ 1,110 13 11. Not a fortune, but a healthy sum in 1881.