If it’s raining it’s Essex

The next day dawned grey and rainy, and we had one vital task before we tried to do some family history sleuthing. We went to the nearest Post Office at Ardleigh to send Wink back her second set of keys. It was a relief to get them on their way back to her. The UK has a similar priority paid post to us in Oz so we were pretty comfortable that they would get back to her safely (which they did the next day, thank heaven).

Once that was done we were free to take up the task of exploring the countryside where my grandmother Esther Ellis’s people came from - namely Ardleigh, Wivenhoe (pronounced Wiv’nho not Wy-ven-ho btw), the mellifluously named Brightlingsea, and lastly St Osyth, all very close to Colchester, the first capital of Roman Britain.

Seeing we were already in Ardleigh, and it was raining ☔️, we took refuge in tourism and had a good look at the magnificent St Mary’s the Virgin before examining the cemetery surrounding it. The church has portions from the 14th & 15th Centuries but was substantially rebuilt in the late 19th C. The record of rectors and vicars (what’s the difference I hear you ask, well a rector received the tithes of the congregation, a vicar did not) dates from an astonishing 1120. Inside this obviously working church, we were both impressed by its beauty and simplicity. Very peaceful and open with no one around, as it should be.

Then to the cemetery when the rain eased. We looked at every headstone. This is a very strange activity and I found myself apologising for walking over dead folk and then reminding myself that they were actually dead and would not mind. We only found one Ellis, and we both realised that such an effort was essentially pointless because gravestones of any antiquity (before say 1850) were often blank, worn down by exposure to the elements. So my ancestors may have been there. I needed to access other records to find them.

Even with this realisation, and the rain, we decided to stick to the plan and tour the other villages where the Ellis line lived. It would be easy to wax poetical about this area of Essex. Beautiful gentle rolling fields, still under cultivation, streams, forests, romantic seasides, beautiful villages and towns even under an angry sky. You can easily imagine why the Romans set up camp and capital there. But what made great grandfather Joseph Edward Ellis born in 1851 in Wivenhoe up stakes to go to Sydney Australia where he died in 1915, can only be imagined. How he must have missed this place! His mother Matilda (née Clarke) was born in St Osyth in 1827 in the shadow of a magnificent decaying priory.Читать далее