HMS Captain 1870         

 

Information and Memories from Descendants (cont)
 

UpJohn Collier Peter Baldwin T G Beenham John Bremner Thomas Butcher C W Dyer J Ellis George Fisher Wilfred Glanville John Gribble Albert Grover George Habens Walter Hedger Robert Herd John Hermitage Tom W Ivey Thomas Kernan RJ Magawley William May Francis Merryman GH Payne Edmund Powell Alfred Ripley Anthony Spiller Arthur Tregaskiss John Walker

  

John Collier, stoker

My great-great-grandfather was born around 1830 in Belford, near Alnwick, Northumberland. He married Sarah Jordan, also from Alnwick, in January 1860.  In 1861 John is recorded as being in Portsmouth with HMS Nelson, tender to HMS Asia; Sarah is registered there too as a visitor, with their first born, (my great-grandmother, also Sarah), but presumably in land accommodation.

In the early 1860s their home was in London , and daughter Sarah and son James were born there, and they moved to Landport, Portsmouth in the mid-1860s where two more children, Eleanor and John, were born.

When HMS Captain was lost in 1870 they were still living in Landport Portsmouth, and at the time of the following year’s census the widowed Sarah was there with her just her two youngest children. My great-grandmother and her oldest brother had moved to Hull Seamans’ Orphans Mission.

The widowed Sarah and all four children subsequently moved to Wensleydale, Yorkshire , to become housekeeper for an uncle at Preston under Scar. Settling in the area,  the mother remarried (to Robert Makepeace) in 1881, and my great-grandmother married a nearby farmer; both married couples and son James are recorded as dying in the area, at Leyburn.

 Christine Amsden (Canada) – great-great-granddaughter