Sarah Ann Green (1829-1902) and Jonathan Jary (1831-1890).
My 3rd great-grand aunt and uncle.
Sarah was baptised on 5 June 1829 at St Nicholas’s Church, Great Yarmouth, and grew up with her siblings and parents William Green and Willoughby Staff in the town.
The 1851 census recorded her living with relative and mariner’s wife Elizabeth Saunders and her children at 18 Napoleon Place in Yarmouth. By then she was working as one of the town’s many beatster, a job that involved mending fishing nets.
Sarah married labourer’s son Jonathan Jary, who was born on 18 June 1831 in Runham, Norfolk, at St Nicholas’s on 13 July 1852. A few years before the marriage he was working as a seaman out of Great Yarmouth, and his merchant navy record showed that he was 5ft 6ins tall, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. I can’t trace the couple in the 1861 or 1871 censuses but we know that they had children in Great Yarmouth but also several others baptised at St Peter’s Church in Brighton, Sussex. The latter baptism records describe Jonathan as a fish curer of 7 Nelson Row, Brighton.
Sarah next crops up in the 1881 census at Lowestoft near the town of her birth, living with her son Frederick and described as a fisherman’s wife. Jonathan isn’t listed, suggesting he was away on census night, and the other children are missing. In 1887 the parents featured in several newspaper reports, the result of a domestic assault. The Eastern Daily Press of 29 August 1887 reported from the Great Yarmouth Police Court that fish merchant Jary had been summoned for threatening his wife Sarah Ann. The prosecution claimed that he’d come home wanting his tea but when she told him there wasn’t any, he became abusive and threatened to hit her with a chair. It was not the first time such an incident had taken place, the court heard, but Jonathan claimed that he’d only raised the chair in anger when he realised that his son and daughter-in-law were still living at his home and had not left as he’d demanded. He said he had no intention of hitting his wife. The case was adjourned for two weeks in the hope that some arrangement could be come to but, as the Eastern Evening News of 10 September 1887 reported, Sarah Ann continued to be afraid about going home. The bench ordered Jonathan – this time described as a fish curer – to be bound over for six months in the sum of £10 to keep the peace as well as to pay the costs. Whether Sarah Ann returned to the family home is unknown.
Jonathan died on 29 October 1890 and was buried at Great Yarmouth Cemetery on 1 November. The 1891 census showed Sarah Ann living with her auctioneer son Robert and his family at 2 Alma Road, Great Yarmouth, but 10 years later she was lodging with the Nye family at 44 Leatherdale Street in east London. What prompted the move is unclear but she may have been living with or near relatives. She died in east London in 1902.
- Robert Jary (1855-1924) was born in Yarmouth but his earlier years are a mystery. In 1891 he was listed as an auctioneer of furniture and was living with his wife, Martha Johns Llewellyn Trahair of Newlyn in Cornwall, his children and his mother in the town. He later became a fish merchant and moved from Norfolk to the West Derby suburb of Liverpool in Lancashire. He was staying at a hotel in Euston Square, St Pancras, London, on the night of the 1921 census but died back in Liverpool three years later. Martha died in 1925.
- Eliza Susannah Jary (1866-1937). A dressmaker in her spinster years, Eliza married merchant seaman William Thomas Utting of Poplar, now East London, in 1898. They raised a family and by 1911 were back in London at Mile End Old Town. William went on to work for his brother in law as a fish porter at Billingsgate Fish Market in London. He died six years after Eliza, in 1943.
- Frederick George Jary (1868-1941 and pictured here with his wife) was born when his parents were in Brighton, Sussex. He married labourer’s daughter Harriet Maria Colby in Great Yarmouth in 1890 and had a number of children. The family moved ultimately to Ilford, Essex, and Frederick was a fish merchant at Billingsgate Fish Market. Harriet lived until 1959.
- William Jary and John Jary were two sons baptised at the same time as Frederick and Eliza – in Brighton in 1869. However, no birth dates were given and I’ve yet to find any other trace of them.
Sources. All data has been gathered from Ancestry.co.uk, Familysearch.org, FindMyPast.co.uk, the British Newspaper Archive, Norfolk Family History Society and Sussex Family History Group.