Rebecca Wetherall (1845-1873).
My 2nd great-grand aunt.
Rebecca was born to Mary Wetherall on 29 January 1845 at the Great Yarmouth Workhouse but the birth certificate has a blank where the father’s name should be, meaning she was illegitimate.
The informant for the record was James Kemp, master of the workhouse. But why Mary had her child there is a mystery. It’s possible the family was in the workhouse anyway, in need of support from the parish to survive, or Mary may have needed specific medical attention not available at home. It’s also the case that many unmarried women who were expecting a child were thrown out of their homes by their parents. But as Mary herself was illegitimate, this seems an unlikely explanation.
Rebecca was baptised on 7 February 1845 at St Mary’s Church in Great Yarmouth, although the record gives her surname as Witherale. She grew up with her mother, brother, aunts, uncles and grandmother and in 1851 several of them were living in Jays Buildings. By 1861 they were at Denes Buildings in Great Yarmouth, Mary with a man who was supposedly her husband, James Harvey. And Rebecca was working as a beatster, someone who mended fishing nets. She’s missing from the 1871 census but I suspect she is the Rebecca Wetherall who married James Peers in Manchester Cathedral on 15 November 1873. He was the son of a gardener, also called James, and described on the marriage record as a provisions dealer of Cromwell Street, Salford. Rebecca has given James Weatherall, a traveller, as her father, which doubtless refers to her step-father but with a ‘respectable’ name substituted.
The 1876 Slater’s directory lists a James Peers, shopkeeper of Cromwell Terrace, South Cross Lane, and it’s likely this is Rebecca’s husband. The couple had a son, James Jnr, on 20 January 1875 and their address at the time was given as 6 Cromwell Terrace, with James Snr’s occupation given as a milk dealer.
Rebecca died just a few years later, on 18 September 1878, but back in Great Yarmouth rather than Salford. The death certificate shows she’d been suffering with cancer of the uterus for at least a year and was at 41 Admiralty Road at the time of her passing. The death was reported by Elizabeth Abel of 54 Ordnance Road, who was her sister-in-law’s mother and present at the death. Whether Rebecca had returned to her home town to die with her family or took a sudden turn for the worse on a visit is impossible to know.
There is a mystery as a result of the death certificate as this lists Rebecca’s husband as James Peers, a tailor. He’d not been described this way before, and curiously there was a James Peers married to a Rebecca working around this time in Liverpool as a tailor. However, his wife was definitely not a Wetherall and they were married at the time of the 1871 census. A James Peers, tailor, died in Mobberley, Cheshire in 1880 of heart disease but I’m unsure whether he is our man as there are multiple candidates in that neck of the woods.
The couple’s son James served in the army in the First World War, married, worked as a storekeeper and died in 1946.
Sources: BMDs and census info at Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk. Birth and death certificates from gro.gov.uk. Records at Norfolk Family History Society.