As anyone who has researched their family history will know - it isn't just your own family you end up finding out about. Particularly if you've got a subscription to a website like www.ancestry.co.uk, which makes it so easy just to type in a name you find to see what comes up. This happened to me with Amy Crown.
Amy Crown's name appeared on the 1908 marriage certificate of my great-grandparents Martin James Lamb and Annie Higinbotham, where she is named as a witness. My great-grandmother Annie has been hard to find, as she left the family when her children were young. I thought that as I was having so much trouble finding Annie, perhaps I could find Amy, and the 1901 census seemed a good place to try.
If the witness had been called John Smith then I wouldn’t have bothered looking, but Amy Crown seemed like a fairly unusual name. As indeed it was - helpfullly, I found only one Amy Crown on the 1901 census, and it was obviously the right record. It showed that Amy Crown was born about 1889, in Hull. She was resident in Holy Trinity parish at the time the census was taken. Most striking was that she was listed as an orphan.
Looking at the original return showed that in 1901 she was one of many occupants in the Hull Workhouse, situated on Anlaby Road.
Photo: from our family collection - unknown children on a Hull street, early 20th century.
A bit more checking of the online census records seemed necessary. And from this, I found her living with her parents at the age of two, ten years earlier, and with lots of siblings.
Amy's mother Susan hailed from Cambridgeshire, and her father William from London. The couple are in their thirties on the 1891 census, and have six children ranging in age from 12 years to 5 months.
I looked for the deaths entries of her parents, and found a death registered in the district of a William Crown in 1898. I expected to find the death of her mother recorded, around the same period, but the matching record was for a death in 1903, after the 1901 census where Amy had been listed as an orphan.
I found Susan Crown, Amy's mother, in the 1901 census. She is working as a washerwoman, with three of her children still living with her. The last column, where disabilities were registered, records her as deaf. They're living in a very small house, on New George Street in Hull.
I looked for the other children of William and Susan Crown, and found another girl called Crown in the workhouse with Amy. One of her sisters, Nellie. She is the more formal "Ellen" on the 1891 census.
It's clear then that the two girls, aged 12 and 10, have been separated from the rest of the family, and though their mother is living they are registered as orphans. I'm not sure how common this was, but it seems that this family had been split by poverty, and that Amy's mother couldn't look after them all. A widowed mother on a low income would have difficulty raising her children.
After Amy was a witness at my great-grandmother's wedding in 1908, it seems she also married. The BMD index has the marriage of an Amy Crown who married in Hull in 1910. After that - well, this is someone else's story. Here's to Amy Crown. I hope she had a long and happy life, after her years in the orphanage.