William Robert Green (1847-1882).
My 2nd great-grand uncle.
William was born in 1847 in Great Yarmouth and baptised on 18 July at St Nicholas’s Church. His parents were William Mark Green and Elizabeth Maria Symonds. He lived in Birmingham and Camberwell, South London, with his parents and siblings before returning to the Norfolk coast with them.
His father died in 1854 and and his mother remarried in 1855. William was living with her in Bermondsey Place West, Great Yarmouth, at the time of the 1861 census. The 1871 census described him as a caulker, responsible for sealing cracks in vessels and making them watertight, and that he was still living with the family, although now in Ordnance Road. Later in the year, on 24 December, he married Ellen Lodge at St Nicholas’s. She’d been born in Yarmouth to Jersey-born labourer William Lodge and his wife Elizabeth in 1848.
Tragically though, and just like his father, William died young and in the Yarmouth Workhouse – probably in its capacity as a hospital. The cause of death, on 12 March 1882, was apoplexy, which was normally a reference to a brain condition such as a stroke or seizure. This is, again, reminiscent of his father’s death. William was buried in Great Yarmouth on 20 March. His widow Ellen (sometimes listed as Helen) remarried in Suffolk in 1883, her new husband James Nathan Howes, but she may be the woman who died in Yarmouth in 1891 a few months after the census showed her living with her family in the town.
William and Ellen had at least four children locally:
- William Robert Green (1872-????) married Kate Alden in 1898. By 1901 he was working as an attendant at the Great Yarmouth Naval Hospital, which was mainly used as a mental hospital, and 10 years later was still there – by which time he had had children with his wife. The 1939 Register shows William and Kate living in Birmingham, Warwickshire, he described as a retired general labourer. He is probably one of the three William Greens who died in the city in the 1950s.
- Herbert Ernest Green (1876-1957) married Minnie Amy Burgess in 1899. They lived in Birmingham, where he worked as a harness maker. Minnie died in 1927 and Herbert remarried in 1934, his bride being Florence Vernon. He remained in his adopted city and died there in 1957.
- Ellen Elizabeth Green (1878-1964) married John Gallant in 1902. He was described as a labourer, a paint sprayer and an engine driver in various records. They remained in the Great Yarmouth area and raised a family there. John died in 1940, Ellen in 1964.
- Edith Agnes Green (1880-1974) married Punjab-born soldier George Arthur Stainfield in 1912. He served in the First World War and rose to the rank of Captain. They moved to Eastbourne in Sussex, and the Eastbourne Herald of 16 March 1963 noted that he was the town’s physical training organiser from 1924 to 1950. In the Second World War he helped organise the evacuation of children. He died in 1963, Edith in 1974.
Sources. All data has been gathered from Ancestry.co.uk, FindMyPast.co.uk, Norfolk Family History Society and British Newspaper Archive (titles in text).