Susannah Symonds (1832-1906), Henry George Martins (1828-1857) and Charles Downing (1824-1883).
My 3rd great-grand aunt and uncles.
Susannah was baptised on 8 October 1832 at St Nicholas’s Church in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, to parents Charles Robinson Witchingham Symonds and Susanna Waters.
She was still living at home at the time of the 1851 census and was working as a beatster, one of the numerous women who mended fishing nets in the town. A few months later – on 10 July – she married fisherman’s son Henry George Martins, who’d been baptised in Yarmouth on 24 November 1828 to parents Robert Martins (sometimes Martin) and his wife Sarah.
They raised a family and Henry worked at sea, with records showing him from 1854 as the Master of the Blue Belle, a lugger or small sailing ship built locally in 1846 and owned by the Yarmouth-based Shuckford family. Henry’s father Robert had been her previous master. Henry died young and was buried in the town on 3 January 1858.
The census of 1861 showed Susannah as a lodging house keeper living with her children in Havelock Road, Great Yarmouth, but she was doing well enough to have a domestic servant to help her. On 20 February 1877 she married bachelor and master mariner Charles Downing at St Peter Mancroft Church in Norwich. Born in Great Yarmouth in 1824 to fish merchant father Richard Downing, Charles was in a relationship with Susannah long before their marriage because the 1871 census listed her as Susannah Downing, wife of a seaman. Charles must’ve been at sea on the night of that census but they were clearly living as man and wife.
Susannah had a number of children during the 1860s and 1870s, several of whom were baptised only after the wedding in 1877. It’s likely that Charles was their father – they took his surname – but it’s impossible to prove. In 1881 the family was living in Havelock Road, Charles listed as a master mariner and Susannah as a lodging house keeper. He died in 1883 and was buried in Great Yarmouth on 22 August. Susannah continued to live in Havelock Road until her death there at number 111 on 27 November 1906, described as the widow of Captain Charles Downing (Yarmouth Independent 1 December 1906). She was buried in the town on 1 December. She left effects worth £238.
Susannah’s children were:
- Susannah Martins (1852-1919). Born in Great Yarmouth, Susannah married bricklayer Timothy Stackard of Seething in Norfolk in 1870. They had several children at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne but then moved to south London, living in and around Lambeth and Southwark. Susannah was buried in Southwark in March 1919. Timothy went on to work as a porter for a time and died in 1937.
- Henry George Martins (1854-1877) went to sea as a young man and was working as a cabin boy out of Yarmouth by 1871. In 1874 he married Sarah Jane Stevens and had a son but he was lost at sea along with his crew when his ship the Contest went down off the Heligoland coast in January 1877. She married Robert Johnson in 1881.
- Caroline Martins (1855-1938). Born in Great Yarmouth, Caroline married Yarmouth-born sail maker James Edward Stevens – her brother-in-law – in 1877. They raised a family but moved around, perhaps wherever work was available. Census records showed them in Leigh on Sea, Essex, as well as Gorleston. James died in 1930, Caroline eight years later. Both were buried at Gorleston Old Cemetery.
- Robert Charles Martins (1857-1880). Robert went to sea and married Yarmouth native Maria Moughton in 1877. They raised a family but he died young. The Norfolk News of 11 December 1880 reported that he was ship’s mate on board the fishing smack Mystery, which was one of six vessels that sank with the loss of all hands in the North Sea during gales on the night of 29 October 1880. Maria never remarried and died in 1926.
- Charles George Downing (1862-1936) was born in Great Yarmouth. In adult life he worked as an engineer and, later, a grocer and beer retailer. He married local woman Agnes Annie Hart in the town in 1888 and they had children together. Agnes died in 1911 and Charles then married Sarah Caroline Read, also from Great Yarmouth, in 1913. The Leicester Evening Mail of 13 October 1936 reported his death in the city and noted that he’d moved there the previous June. It also said that he’d been an innkeeper and, indeed, the 1921 census recorded the family at the Falgate Inn, Potter Heigham, Norfolk. Sarah died in Leicester in 1968.
- Melissa Downing (1864-1945) was Susannah’s first daughter with her second partner. She was baptised as illegitimate in Yarmouth in 1867 and was working as an outfitter’s machinist by the 1891 census. She married Singer sewing machine salesman Charles William Newman in 1904 and had several children. They settled in Fulham, now in London. He died in 1936. Melissa spent her last years with her daughter Gladys’ family and died in Wembley in 1945.
- Arthur William Downing (1870-1937). Arthur worked as a baker but in 1890 began service as a driver with the Royal Field Artillery. He spent much of the following decade in India and then went to South Africa to serve in the Boer War. It was between these engagements, in 1898, that he married Maria Coates of Ryburgh in Norfolk and began raising a family. He also served in the First World War but it appears that he was on the home front at the Royal Garrison Artillery depot in Great Yarmouth, which managed such things as the training of new recruits. Outside of the military he worked as a stoker at a silk manufacturer. Arthur died in his 60s in 1937 but Maria lived until 1967.
- Alice Maud Downing (1872-1892) was baptised in 1878, six years after her birth. The 1891 census listed her living with her widowed mother and working as an outfitter’s machinist but the Yarmouth Independent of 5 November 1892 reported her death at Earlswood Asylum, Reigate, Surrey. Quite why she was so far from home is unknown.
- Edith Emma Downing (1874-1949) married Henry Charles Brake in Kensington and Chelsea in 1899. He was born there and worked as a clerk. They had had four children by the 1911 census, when the couple were living in Wimbledon, but all had died. A later son, Jack, survived. The Luton News of 30 October 1919 reported the transfer of licence for the Nag’s Head pub in Toddington, Bedfordshire, from Henry to Edith on his death, so the couple had at some point left the city for a new life in Bedfordshire. London Workhouse records from Camden / St Pancras noted that Henry had been admitted but had been discharged on 23 January 1919 to Hanwell. A notation on the document suggests he was mentally ill – and Hanwell was the location of the St Bernard’s Hospital asylum. He actually died on 1 October that year at University College Hospital. Edith died in 1949 while living back in Wimbledon.
Sources: BMDs and census records at Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk. Norfolk Family History Society. British Newspaper Archive (titles in text).