two continents, three women, and the search for martha...

History & Mystery, Perfect Together! Maureen Wlodarczyk | www.GardenStateLegacy.com Issue 34 Dec. 2016

It all started a few months ago with an email sent to meby a woman named Moira Ruddick. Moira is in hereighties and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. She

was writing to me on behalf of herself and her dear friendNora Handcock. Nora, also in her eighties, had (years ago)inherited an antique schoolgirl embroidery sampler fromher Aunt Maggie and, indownsizing to a smallerhome, had given thesampler to Moira. Moira,with some experience ingenealogical research andhaving honed her computerskills by taking classes, hadtaken a stab at finding theyoung woman who hadembroidered the sampler. . . in 1795. Her searchingon the web for leads had ledher to me and a 2013magazine article I hadwritten about Irishschoolgirl samplers and, inparticular, a 1792 Irishsampler that I own—createdby a student named AnneWalpole at the Suir IslandQuaker School in Clonmel,County Tipperary, Ireland.

Moira’s email said thatwhen she discovered myarticle, she felt she hadfinally “hit gold,” herexcitement due to the factthat the 1795 samplerowned by her friend andgifted to her had beenwrought by Martha Jellico,another student at theClonmel Quaker School! Theschool had been a boardingand finishing school for girls established in 1787 byprosperous Quaker missionaries and philanthropists Robert

TwoContinents,

Three Women, and

the Search forMartha Jellico Moira Ruddick

Nora Handcock

and Sarah Tuke Grubb. Studies includedforeign languages, science, literature, andreligion, along with the expected classes indrawing and needlework with an overallemphasis on the disciplines of the Quakerlifestyle.

Moira’s email included an image ofthe signature block of Martha’s sampler,leaving no doubt about its origins. And, in agesture of extreme generosity, she offeredto gift Martha’s sampler to me to be acompanion to my own Clonmel sampler if Iwould like to have it. She and Nora hopedthat I would put my research skills to workin an attempt to reach back two centuries tofind Martha Jellico and resurrect the storyof her life. I’m not sure what intrigued memore—a totally unexpected gift from twostrangers on the other side of the Atlantic orthe challenge of rediscovering MarthaJellico’s story. No matter, I was hooked. Thesampler soon arrived from England and Ijumped into the search for Martha Jellico.

I contacted The Friends HistoricalLibrary in Dublin and, based upon theestimated birth date range I provided,obtained a spreadsheet listing informationon a number of Martha Jellicos in theirrecords. Unfortunately, none of those

Marthas appeared to be a match with the sampler-maker. Afterthat dead-end, I changed direction and hit the web, looking forsigns of Martha in Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, andFindMyPast.com. Several hours into the search, I had abreakthrough on FindMyPast. I located a Quaker marriagerecord for a Martha Jellico, daughter of James and MaryJellico, of the right age who had married in 1806 in Limerick,


Martha Jellico’s 1795 sampler

The 1806 Quaker marriage record Martha Jellico to Thomas Harris (last line)

History & Mystery, Perfect Together! Maureen Wlodarczyk | www.GardenStateLegacy.com Issue 34 Dec. 2016History & Mystery, Perfect Together! Maureen Wlodarczyk | www.GardenStateLegacy.com Issue 33 Sept. 2016

Ireland. Her groom was an English Quaker, Thomas Harris, ofMaryport, Cumberland, England—a town in the very north ofEngland about eighty-five miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne,the locale where Moira and Nora live. Could Martha’s marriagehave meant a relocation to England, and might she have takenher schoolgirl embroidery sampler with her?

Further searching in English Quaker “Non-Comformist”records confirmed that the newlyweds did travel from Irelandto take up residence in Thomas’s hometown, Maryport. There,between 1807 and 1811, three children were born to them: a

daughter and two sons.In addition, that led to thediscovery of informationabout Thomas Harrishimself, including his1783 birth recordindicating that he wasborn in Maryport andwas the son of AnthonyHarris and Isabella Bull.Also unearthed wasAnthony Harris’s birthrecord dating to 1755, hebeing the son of oneWilliam Harris. Thomas’smother, Isabella Bull was,like Thomas’s wifeMartha, born in Ireland.In fact, a Quakermarriage recordconfirms that Thomas’s

parents Anthony and Isabella were married in Dublin, Ireland in1778.

The combination of excellent Quaker recordkeeping and thedigitization of early English vital records had even more toreveal as I continued searching. Isabella Harris, MarthaJellico’s Irish-born mother-in-law, was widowed in 1795 whenher husband, a mariner, was drowned in the Irish Sea. Isabella,then in her thirties and the mother of more than a half-dozenchildren, became a well-respected Quaker educator in Englandin the early decades of the 1800s. An 1833 edition of theAnnual Monitor, a Quaker publication, recorded the 1832 deathof Isabella Harris and noted her more than twenty years’service as the “principal mistress” of the Ackworth Schoolbetween 1803 and 1826.

The search for information on Martha and Thomas’s threechildren resulted in no success with respect to their daughter’sadult life, perhaps because she married although no marriagerecord for her was found. Things went much better with their

The Master’s Certificate of James Harris

sons, Anthony and James. James became an apprenticemerchant seaman before the age of eighteen and ultimatelyrose to the rank of “Master” in the British Merchant Serviceduring a career spanning twenty-four years. James marriedbut UK census records for 1841, 1851 and 1861 show nochildren living with him and his wife Ellen. James’s brotherAnthony married Rachael Atkinson in 1836 in Stockton-on-Tees, Durham, England. Census records for 1841 and 1851recorded the couple living in Stockton and Middlesborough andindicated that they had eight children. By 1851, Anthony Harriswas a successful businessman and gave his occupations asboth “coalfitter” and “ship owner.” In addition to the Harrisfamily, the household included four servants. Sadly, AnthonyHarris died six years later in 1857 at the age of forty-eight. Hiswidow Rachael was recorded four years later in the 1861 UKcensus and gave her occupation as a “coal and cokemerchant.” She was the head of a household that included sixof her children, a governess, nursery maid, cook, laundress anda general house maid. She was obviously holding her owndespite having lost her husband.

Having tracked our Irish sampler-maker Martha Jellicofrom her schoolgirl days in County Tipperary, to her 1806marriage in Limerick and her new life in England as the wife ofThomas Harris, and having charted the lives of their children, itwas time to find out what became of Martha and Thomasthemselves. An 1834 death certificate told the story of ThomasHarris’s death in Middlesborough in October of that year at theage of fifty-one. The certificate listed his occupation as “coalfitter” and indicated that his place of burial was in Stockton.The search for information about Martha proved much moredifficult. One clue was revealed in the 1836 marriage record forher son Anthony which listed his father Thomas as deceasedbut did not indicate that his mother Martha was deceased atthe time of the wedding. That narrowed the search for evidenceof Martha’s life or death to 1836 and after. No sign of Marthawas found in the next UK census, taken in 1841. After locatingan 1845 death index record for a Quaker woman namedMartha Harris, I ordered a copy of the actual death certificatefrom the General Register Office in England. When it arrived, itraised more questions than it answered and left me unsurethat the deceased was, in fact, the Martha Harris I was chasing.


Record of the death of Thomas Harris

The age, listed as “about 69,” was close but, by my estimate,Martha would have been in her early-to-mid-sixties in 1845.The death had occurred in Sunderland in the home of a womanknown to take in boarders. Why would a widowed Martha havetaken up residence as a boarder when, in 1845, both of hersons were living and apparently doing well? As of now, nodefinitive signs of Martha after 1836 have been absolutelyconfirmed but what is known can be charted as follows:

While I was working on this side of the Atlantic, Moira wasdigging on the other side of the pond, focusing on connectingthe local dots that might explain how Martha’s sampler cameto belong to her friend Nora’s aunt. Moira began furthertracking the lives of Martha’s children and grandchildren.Having no luck finding any signs of Martha’s daughter andsince her son James had no children, she honed in on Martha’sson Anthony’s children. She discovered that one of Anthony’ssons became a doctor and another (Charles) became anaccountant, married, and later became a shipbroker and theowner of a large house in the Elswick section of Newcastleupon Tyne. Martha Jellico Harris’s grandson Charles Harriswas not the only one with ties to Elswick it would turn out.Nora’s Aunt Maggie, the person who owned Martha’s samplerfor many years, was a school teacher who never married. AuntMaggie’s mother was also a school teacher and had lived inElswick herself. Moira used a street map to plot the twolocations where Charles Harris and Maggie’s mother eachresided and found they lived on adjoining streets, that raisingthe very real possibility that they had known each other andthat Charles had given her the sampler, perhaps as a gift to afavorite school teacher or family friend.

Moira turned up one other interesting connection to theHarris family: a 1953 article on hereditary color-blindnesspublished in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, the subjectmatter discussing the instances of color-blindness in theHarris family of Maryport. Among the Harrises cited in thearticle was none other than Anthony Harris (1755–1795), thefather of Martha Jellico’s husband Thomas Harris. And, in thespirit of the genealogy maxim “one thing leads to another,” thearticle revealed another fascinating fact: Thomas Harris’syounger sister Isabella (born in 1792 in Maryport) had, in 1818,married Joseph Jackson Lister who met her when he visited


James & Mary JellicoLimerick, Ireland

Martha JellicoDaughter

Isabella HarrisBorn 1807

Anthony HarrisBorn 1809

James HarrisBorn 1811

Anthony & Isabella HarrisMaryport, England

Thomas HarrisSon (1783-1834)

Married1806, Limerick

the Ackworth School while she was a teacher and her motherwas headmistress there. Their son grew up to become LordJoseph Lister, the well-known and respected British surgeonand pioneer in the development of antiseptic medicalprocedures. (Listerine was named for Lord Lister.)

The search for the identity and life of a young Irishschoolgirl who embroidered a simple sampler two hundredtwenty-one years ago took Moira, Nora, and me on a merrychase and, as is so often the case with genealogical research,yielded so much more than the answers we set out to find.During a recent presentation I gave, an attendee asked how Idetermined what to pursue in looking for new topics for mywriting—in other words, how I figured out what looked like apromising lead in the form of things like an old letter found at aflea market, an antique like Martha’s sampler, or an enticingarticle in an old newspaper archive. My answer? I have nospecial gift for picking “winners” when it comes to writing orspeaking topics. The truth is that the most mundane-appearing lead comes with the irresistible challenge of thehunt and the prospect of unexpected discoveries . . . as whenthe search for Martha Jellico led to Lord Joseph Lister forinstance. In that case, it wasn’t Lord Lister’s fame that madethe search worthwhile. The satisfaction came from a journeyinspired by a child’s needlework that took us across centuriesand countries and resurrected the lives of generations of anAnglo-Irish Quaker family.

Thank you so very much Moira and Nora!

Sources for this article are as follows:- Ancestry.com- FamilySearch.org- FindMyPast.com- United Kingdom General Register Office- The Friends Historical Library—Dublin, Ireland- The Library of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain—London, England- Crerar, J. W. and Ross, J. A. “John Dalton, F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D., Captain Joseph

Huddart, F.R.S., and the Harris Family—Historical Notes on Congenital Colour Blindness.” British Journal of Ophthalmology (1953) 37, 181.


Isabella Harris ListerSister-in-law of Martha

Jellico Harris

Lord Joseph Lister

“Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brainsas they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge

hidden in every cell of our bodies." --- Shirley Abbott

Maureen WlodarczykGenealog is t , Speaker / Inst ructor & Author

Genealogy Research ServicesNo-Charge PreliminaryConsultation Search

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