Henry Finch (1834-1919), Lydia Lambourn (1822-1891) and Eleanor Streeter (1845-1927).
My 2nd great-grand uncle and aunts.
Henry Finch was baptised in St Mary’s Church in Reigate, Surrey, on 9 March 1834, the son of Henry Finch and Jane Bashford.
His father was an agricultural labourer and he grew up with the family in and around Reigate. By 1851 young Henry was also as a farm labourer but he then married Lydia Lambourn, on 9 September 1856 in St Mary’s, Reigate. She’d been born in 1822 in Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, and was the daughter of a chair maker, but how they met is a mystery. In the 1851 census she was working as a cook at a house in Marylebone, London, so it’s possible that her job brought her south to Reigate, either with the same family or a new one. Henry and Lydia had at least two children – William and Lydia.
In 1861 the family was living at a house in Wray Common, Reigate, probably in the grounds of a grand Victorian property called Oaklands, where Henry was working as a gardener. Ten years on the census showed the family was living in the gardener’s cottage there. Oaklands was the home of the Wallers (he being a retired solicitor) and one of their servants was Phoebe Ann Ward, who would go on to marry Henry’s brother Isaac Finch.
Census records from 1881 and 1891 also listed Henry as a gardener at Wray Common but whether he was still a servant is unclear. Either way, in the 1880s he was wealthy enough to buy land around Hardwick Road and Lower Road in Reigate. The conveyance document, now at Surrey History Centre and dated 19 March 1883, shows that it included two dwellings and that he bought the property for £305 from local men William Thomas Dixon and Harry Scott.
Henry’s mother and father died soon after, in 1885, and then his wife Lydia passed away in 1891.
Henry married again in 1893, his new bride being butcher’s daughter and spinster Eleanor Streeter. She’d been born in 1845 in Croydon, Surrey, and they married in the parish church of St Andrew’s there on 8 June. By that point Henry had moved and was living at 51 Doods Road, Reigate, which became the family home. Living with the couple in 1901 was eight-year-old Bertha Finch, described as a granddaughter. Henry was still a gardener but was by then working ‘on his own account’.
Henry died on 1 January 1919 and was buried in Reigate on 8 January, leaving effects worth £1,540. Probate was granted to his son William Henry Finch, a baker, and friend William Edward Wilson, a tea specialist who was responsible for opening a number of tea shops and cafes in the Croydon area. His shop in North End, Croydon, became the first in the town to be lit by electricity. Henry’s son William Henry received his father’s two freehold cottages in South Park and two others in Meadvale. Eleanor Finch was granted £250, all furnishings and effects in the family home and his life insurance money. His grandchildren, siblings and William Wilson received smaller bequests. Eleanor died in 1927.
Henry and Lydia’s two children were:
- William Henry Finch (1859-1933). Like his father, William worked for a time as a gardener but he later became a baker and shopkeeper, with the 1911 census listing him at 28 Church Road, Guildford, with his family. His first marriage was to Lydia Bridges in 1882 but she died in 1897. He then married spinster Kate Boxall in Reigate in 1903. He died in Guildford in 1933, Kate in 1939.
- Lydia Finch (1863-1920). Lydia married signwriter William Francis in 1882 and raised a family with him. She died in Reigate in 1920.
Sources: Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk for BMDs and census returns, England & Wales National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1966. Surrey Mirror 10 January 1919. Conveyance ref 8770/5/1 at Surrey History Centre. Henry’s will.