The brilliantly versatile Brenda Blethyn, OBE, one of Britain’s best-loved actresses, has a family history that is as unorthodox as her acting career.

Brenda Blethyn - courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

The actress has made over 30 films, including the one that propelled her to stardom, Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996). She’s veered an eclectic path between film comedies like Saving Grace and the cricket-based TV series Outside Edge, a cinema adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and gritty dramas like Vera, in which she currently stars as a dedicated, obsessive detective chief inspector solving murders in north-east England.

Brenda Blethyn was born in the Kent seaside town of Ramsgate in 1946, the youngest of nine born to a Roman Catholic couple who didn’t marry until they’d already had eight children! Brenda herself has never made any bones about this, for in her memoirs entitled Mixed Fancies (2006) she wrote:

“According to Dad, when he met Mum it was love at first sight and it wasn’t long before he popped the question. Mum, however, although she felt the same way, said she needed a little more persuading. Quite a lot more persuading as it turned out! Even after the birth of their eighth child in 1943.”

Technically speaking, then, Brenda was the only one of the nine born in wedlock. She was born as Brenda Anne Bottle on 20 February 1946.

Brenda’s parents were William Charles Bottle, born in 1894 at Boughton under Blean, a village between Faversham and Canterbury, and Louisa Kathleen Supple, born in 1904 at Canterbury. Thus, when Brenda arrived her father was almost 52 and her mother was 41. Brenda was 20 years junior to her eldest sibling.

The couple had met in the early 1920s when both were in service at a big house in Broadstairs, next to Ramsgate. William came back from six years with the Royal Field Artillery in India, where he was a bombardier, to work as a chauffeur in a household where Louisa was a parlour maid. According to Brenda in her memoirs, the family were poor but very close.

I found William C Bottle in the 1911 census. He was then aged 17 and working as a milkman –perhaps an appropriate occupation given his surname! The family were at 77 Church Street, St Peters, Broadstairs, and William’s parents – Brenda’s grandparents – were another William Bottle and his wife, Jane Ellen.

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William snr was shown as being aged 53, a labourer, born at Maidstone, and Jane Ellen was 47, born at Ramsgate. According to the census schedule, they had been married for 31 years and had had eight children, all of them then still living, but only William and his younger brother, Thomas, 14, were still at home.

Brenda’s mother, Louisa Kathleen Supple, appears also in the 1911 census at 99 Military Road, Canterbury. She was aged seven and one of six children living with their parents, Edward Supple, a 36-year-old plasterer, and his wife who was also called Louisa, aged 34. The whole family all gave Canterbury as their birthplace. This entry shows that Edward and Louisa had been married for 13 years and had had nine children, two of whom had died.

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With Findmypast.co.uk’s marriages indexes, I found the marriage of Brenda’s paternal grandparents William Bottle and Jane Annie Ellen Challen in Thanet, Kent in 1878. I traced William and Jane through the various censuses and it seems fairly clear that, when she married William Bottle, Jane Challen was only 15, perhaps just short of 16. He would have been 19 or 20.

In those days, the minimum age for marriage was 14 for a male and 12 for a female (until 1929). Not too many girls married at 15 but it was by no means impossible.

I was fortunate enough to be supplied by another descendant with a photo of the couple, which appears on a Bottle One-Name Study website and is reproduced here.

William Bottle and Jane Challen - courtesy of Liz Samson

One slight oddity I discovered in the census records was that in 1881 William Bottle was enumerated with his in-laws, Edward and Clara Challen, at 11 Hackney Road, Shoreditch, Middlesex, in London’s East End. William’s occupation was given as ’sweep’ and he was only eight years younger than his mother-in-law, Clara Challen, aged 32, born at Canterbury. Edward Challen, 36, was a tobacconist, born at Ramsgate.

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Where was Jane, William’s young wife? She was at 12 Staffordshire Street, Ramsgate, aged 18 and described as the wife of a chimney sweep, with their daughter, Eliza, just a year old.

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Why William and Jane were enumerated separately in 1881 is a mystery – possibly William was just visiting his in-laws at Shoreditch. However, they were together in all the subsequent censuses in Kent, William being a chimney sweep’s labourer in 1891, a bricklayer’s labourer in 1901 and described simply as a labourer in 1911.

William Bottle’s birth was found in findmypast.co.uk’s birth indexes in Maidstone in 1858. Yet when I looked for him and his parents in the 1861 census, I stumbled upon another curiosity! There was only one candidate – a William Bottle, aged 2, one of four children living with parents Charles and Elizabeth Bottle, at Bone Alley, Maidstone.

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However, William’s birthplace was shown as Stepney, which could only have been an error because in all subsequent censuses it was clearly given as Maidstone. Moreover, I could find no birth of a William Bottle at Stepney at the appropriate time.

Charles Bottle was a shoemaker, born at Maidstone, but unfortunately his age was unclear. The image suggests it could have been 61, 57 or 51. I subsequently discovered that, in fact, Charles was baptised in 1809. Whatever Charles’s age, his wife, Elizabeth, a needle woman, was considerably younger, being shown as 40 and her birthplace given as Abingdon, Berkshire. This couple, Charles and Elizabeth Bottle, were Brenda Blethyn’s great-grandparents.

Oh dear – the vagaries of censuses once more! I found Charles and Elizabeth Bottle in 1851 when they were living at 3 Bartholomew Place, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets with four children all born in the East End of London. Charles was a bootmaker, aged 39, and Elizabeth was 30, her birthplace in this census being given as Reading, Berkshire, some way from Abingdon.

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A close analysis of the 1851 and 1861 censuses and birth indexes – taking into account the errors – suggests that Charles and Elizabeth had half a dozen children born in the East End between about 1842 and 1856 and then another two, including William, born at Maidstone.

I couldn’t find a marriage between Charles and Elizabeth though, either in Kent or East London. So I obtained a copy of the birth certificate of their son William from the General Register Office for England and Wales.

This revealed that he was born on 4 July 1858 in the registration district of Maidstone at 6 Windmill Row. His father was Charles Bottle, a shoemaker journeyman, and his mother was Elizabeth Bottle, formerly Wellman.

Despite being armed with this new information, I could still find no marriage between a Charles Bottle and Elizabeth Wellman. So, either the marriage was  somehow not recorded or the couple were never married in the first place – shades of the relationship of Brenda Blethyn’s parents decades later!

* Thanks for help with this article to John Bottle, who runs the Bottle One-Name Study and Liz Samson, a descendant of William and Jane Bottle who supplied the photograph of that couple.

Roy Stockdill

Roy Stockdill has been a family historian for almost 40 years. A former national newspaper journalist, he edited the Journal of One-Name Studies (for the Guild of One-Name Studies) for 10 years. He is on the Board of Trustees of the Society of Genealogists and is commissioning editor of the ‘My Ancestors…’ series of books. He writes regularly for Family Tree magazine.

‘Are you, were you, or do you know, a master hat–maker? If yes, we tip our caps to you, and hope that you might have something to share… We’re currently researching the hatting and straw plaiting industry in southern England - the commercial hub was in Luton, but the trade was also vitally important to people throughout Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Essex. If you, or anyone in your family, worked in the trade and would like to share your memories or any photographs, we would love to hear from you – you can contact the author directly at katie.carmichael@english-heritage.org.uk’

Please do get in touch if you’d like to share any of your knowledge with Katie!

The major inclusions in this update are:

• The complete Queen’s South Africa medal roll for the Coldstream Guards, Irish Guards, 1st battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers and Rundles Scouts
• The Wepener clasp rolls for Royal Scots, Royal Engineers, Cape Mounted Rifles, Driscoll’s Scouts and the Kaffrarian Rifles

The Boer War records can tell you vast amounts of crucial information about your military ancestors, including the unit in which they served, where they became a casualty, which war memorial they appear on and the honours and awards they received.

This update brings the total number of records on findmypast.co.uk to 269,425. The records come from more than 470 sources, some of which are extremely rare and others are out of print.

Meurig Jones provided findmypast.co.uk with these records.

Search the Boer War records now

The records include all surviving original wills of Cheshire residents proved at the Chester diocesan consistory court 1492-1857 and registered copies made at Chester Probate Registry 1858-1911.

Anyone with Cheshire roots will be keen to search these records to find vital new information to add to their family tree.

The Chester wills and probate records are the latest addition to our Cheshire Collection, which we published last year.

We are working in partnership with Cheshire Archives and Local Studies to bring you these records.

Search Chester wills and probate records now

Doreen Tyrrell sent us her photo and asked:

‘I wondered if you could possibly date the attached photo. I am hoping it is around 1890 to confirm who I think it is, but it could possibly 1902-ish?’

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Jayne says:

‘It’s perfectly natural for family historians to guess at the identities of ancestors in old photographs that aren’t labelled with a name or date – a common scenario! Having them accurately dated will always help to either confirm or disprove a theory, ruling different possibilities in or out. The visual evidence doesn’t lie and, particularly, the clothing and accessories worn by past family members in a photograph can only date from within a certain time period. Here we see a youngish couple, whose dress we would expect to be fairly up-to-date for its time, whatever their social background.

When women appear in a photograph, this always offers a closer timeframe than male-only portraits, since female fashions changed regularly and can usually be pinpointed to within a few years. This lady wears the separate blouse and skirt that was becoming popular in the early 20th century, her plain tailored skirt fitting smoothly over the hips and shaped with panels to flare out towards the hemline following the fashionable line.

As usual the blouse is the more decorative garment and here we see the typical blouse of the early-Edwardian era, full in front, to accentuate the bust, and embellished with neat vertical tucks on the sleeves. The sleeve style gives the best dating clue, as this shape, narrow in the upper arm and widening towards the wrist, where it is gathered into a fitted cuff, is typical of the years 1901-1904.

Hat styles are also helpful for dating and, although several types of ornate hat were worn at any given time, this shape, worn at a slight slant on the head, is again characteristic of the early-1900s. You don’t mention why you have in mind the years 1890 or 1902, but a date of 1902 would certainly fit this photograph perfectly.

Men’s appearance is not possible to date as precisely as that of women but the man here wears the characteristic three-piece lounge suit of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, an ornate watch chain suspending a seal worn across the waistcoat front. Interestingly, instead of the usual formal starched shirt collar and tie of this era, he wears a black neckerchief: labouring men often wore a handkerchief or scarf around the neck, so I would guess that this ancestor worked in the manual trades.

The pose of this couple, one standing, the other seated, is typical of an early studio wedding photograph. There is no indication of a wedding here in the sense of white dress or flowers; however, this was not unusual in the early-1900s when many ordinary brides simply wore a good daytime outfit and decorative hat on their wedding day. Notice, though, how the lady prominently displays rings on the third finger of her left hand: this could also signify that marriage was the occasion that prompted this photograph. Hopefully 1902 was the date of a recorded family wedding and this has now helped you to establish the identity of these ancestors.’

Jayne Shrimpton

If you’d like to send your photo to Jayne Shrimpton, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account. Jayne only has time to analyse two photos each month, but if yours wasn’t chosen this time, you could be lucky next month!

Margaret Noble sent us her photo and asked:

‘I would be grateful if you could give me an approximate date for this photograph. I think the lady is my great-great grandmother, who was a Roman Catholic. Any other information that you can glean from the photo would be very welcome. Many thanks.’

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Jayne says:

‘This professional card-mounted studio portrait is likely to be one of the two standard types of photograph that dominated Victorian and early Edwardian portrait photography: either the small carte de visite or the larger cabinet print which was more popular in the late 19th century. This is a fairly late example, as seen from the dark coloured mount, printed with gold lettering. Black, bottle green and, less commonly, chocolate brown were fashionable colours for photographic card mounts for about 20 years only, c.1885-1905. Many family collections contain photographs on dark mounts, so knowing their period of production provides a helpful dating clue.

Here we see a middle-aged or slightly older lady seated in the three-quarter length pose characteristic of the late-19th century. The style of her clothes is very distinctive and offers an accurate idea of when the photo was taken. Her tight-fitting bodice with pointed centre front, high collar and narrow sleeves was fashionable during the later 1880s and beginning of the 1890s. We can’t see the exact shape of her skirt from her seated position but the slight draping of the front fabric suggests that the back may feature a modest projection - the late phase of the 1880s bustle sometimes seen around the turn of the decade. Her day cap was an older lady’s accessory by this time and its tall shape is again typical of the late-1880s or early-1890s. On a younger woman her dress style would usually indicate a close timeframe of c.1887-90, but, being older, she may be rather behind the times, so I suggest that we consider the years 1887-93.

A person’s religion is rarely evident from a photograph but what is striking about this lady’s appearance is that she is wearing mourning dress – the special clothing and accessories recommended following the death of a close relative and an important element of Victorian death ritual. Older ladies often wore black, therefore, it can be hard to positively identify mourning in photographs but here we see very clearly the bands of crape on her bodice lapels, cuffs and in a deep swathe on her lower skirt. Crape, a crimped, dull silk gauze fabric, has a distinctive textured appearance and since crape was only worn for mourning, when spotted in a photo it always signifies bereavement. In fact, mourning would have been the event that inspired this portrait, as having a photograph taken in formal mourning dress was a significant aspect of the occasion. With mourning dress, nothing was supposed to shine or gleam: notice how she also wears a dull black metal watch chain and black mourning brooch.

Victorian women wore a more recognisable form of mourning dress than men and widows bore a heavy burden as they officially publicly mourned their deceased husbands for at least two and a half years. Mourning dress is a complex subject but the presence of touches of white here, on her cap and cuffs, suggest that this lady may have been in the second stage of mourning when she was photographed. I don’t know your 2 x great grandmother’s dates, but if she lost her husband in the late-1880s or early-1890s, then this confirms that she is very likely to be the ancestor pictured here.’

Jayne Shrimpton

If you’d like to send your photo to Jayne Shrimpton, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account. Jayne only has time to analyse two photos each month, but if yours wasn’t chosen this time, you could be lucky next month!

From Adrian Shepard:

‘I wonder if you can help me with a question regarding finding the date of death of my great-great-great-grandfather?

My great-great-great-grandfather was Benjamin Shepard from Lymington (born in 1782). His name appears in local parish records for the birth of his children with wife Mary Ann Green (born in 1784 and died in 1856).

By the time of the first census in 1841, and also in 1851, however, he doesn’t seem to be listed again with his wife and children. I can’t find a record of his death locally in Lymington but his name and profession appear on several marriage certificates for his children.

Does that mean he was alive at the time of the children’s weddings in 1853 and 1859? Would it normally say ‘deceased’ on the marriage certificate? Many thanks for any help/advice you can give.’

Stephen says:

‘Dear Adrian,

Thanks for your question.

The answer to your question is that theoretically a marriage certificate should record if the father of a bride or groom is deceased. If the 1853 and 1859 marriage certificates in your possession are silent on this point, therefore, normally one would infer that the father was indeed still alive at those dates, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

No proof was required by the registrar, however, so the information recorded in the marriage register (and on the marriage certificate produced from it) will only ever be as good as the knowledge of the informant providing it (usually the bride or groom, as applicable). For example, in cases of family estrangement, a person getting married may not know whether his or her father is deceased and may, therefore, state that he is alive when he is not (or, conversely, that he is dead when he is not). You should, therefore, proceed tentatively upon the basis that the father Benjamin was alive in 1859 but remain alive to the possibility of him having died by that date.

If you have not done so already, you should also obtain a copy of the death certificate of his spouse Mary Ann from 1856. This should describe her as either the wife, or the widow, of Benjamin. If it states “widow”, then one would assume that he was in fact dead by 1856. If it states “wife”, however, then this could add extra weight to Benjamin being alive at that date – and of course if he was the informant at her death, that would be conclusive! Should he not have been the informant, the same reservations would apply as for the marriage certificates and the evidence is only as good as the state of knowledge of the informant at death.

I am sure that, with a last name such as Shepard, you will already have thought of searching under name variants. If not, you should definitely extend your search using the more common spellings of the last name: on findmypast.co.uk, just tick the ‘include variants’ box when doing a death search.

Having said that, there is a death for a Benjamin Shepard in Lymington registration district for the December quarter of 1853 and another in Southampton in the September quarter of 1863. Unfortunately, at this date the original death indexes that the General Register Office compiled do not give age at death (this was not introduced until March quarter 1866), although the actual death register and a death certificate issued from it will give age, and of course these entries may relate to individuals of completely different age.

Good luck with your research!’

If you’d like to send your question to our experts, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account. Unfortunately our experts only have time to answer a few queries each month. If yours wasn’t answered this time, you could be lucky next month!

Congratulations go to Tracy Suthers from Lancashire who correctly answered ‘1745′. Tracy wins a copy of ‘Family Matters: A History of Genealogy’ by Michael Sharpe.

Thanks to all of you who entered - look out for the next competition question in our April newsletter, coming your way very soon.

This latest addition to our Handsworth Cemetery records collection brings the total amount of records to 74,623.

The records span the period 1909 to 2010 and will be a real help to anyone with Birmingham ancestors.

Search the burial records now

Sailor superstition #1: Women on board a ship make the sea angry

The header pages from the ship’s passenger list reveal that there were 353 female passengers travelling on the Titanic. The passenger list records the people who boarded at Southampton and Queenstown, but the list of those who boarded at Cherbourg does not survive.

Header page from the Titanic's passenger list, recording the passengers who boarded at Southampton

Sailor superstition #2: It’s unlucky to have a priest on board

A list of the passengers and crew who were supposed drowned can be found in our maritime death records. These record the occupation of each victim, revealing that four of the Titanic’s passengers were Ministers of Religion.

Two of the Ministers of Religion listed in the Maritime death records

Sailor superstition #3: Cutting your hair at sea is bad luck

The list of those who perished in the disaster also shows that there were three Barbers travelling on the Titanic. Two of these were crew members who would have practised their trade on the ship.

One of the Barbers listed in the Maritime death records

Sailor superstition #4: A dog seen near fishing tackle is bad luck

We’ve uncovered this article in The British Newspaper Archive which states that there were dogs (and a pig!) on board the Titanic:

An article from The Western Times, Saturday 20 April 1912

Sailor superstition #5: People with red hair bring bad luck to a ship

You can find many of the Titanic’s surviving crew members listed in our Merchant Navy seamen records. You’ll often find a physical description or a photograph included, as is the case with John Alexander Podesta. Podesta worked as a Fireman on the Titanic and his Merchant Navy index card describes his hair colour as being ‘auburn’.

John Podesta's Merchant Navy seamen record

Sailor superstition #6: Flowers are unlucky on board a ship

Another of the Titanic’s Firemen, Charles Rice, also survived and appears in the Merchant Navy records. He was recorded as having a tattoo on his right forearm depicting a basket of flowers.

Charles Rice's Merchant Navy seaman record

Do you think there’s any truth behind superstitions like these? Is there anything you do or avoid doing to bring you luck?