We are indebted to Mrs. A. Bamford .. the 'Strays Coordinator' ofthe Berkshire Family History Society, for sending this entry:
Married, 22 June, 1816, at Cookham, George Augustus WOODS, of theIsle of Man, Bachelor, to Anna Maria CONEY, Spinster.
It was Mr. Robert P. Geyer who wrote to Mrs. Lyle after readingabout the pictorial plate depicting The Mormon Temple at Salt LakeCity, that had been left in a Peel house at a change of tenants;. Thenews cutting read: 'Robert Gracey of Peel in the year 1851, when hewas only 16 years old, landed in America; and walked across theAmerican continent, including the Rocky Mountains, to the Californiagold fields. He died in Nevada; aged 90, one of the last survivors ofthe Indian wars.'
At about the same time as Mr Meyer wrote I had noticed an enquiryin the July 1979 edition of what was to be the most precise anddetailed Magazine of family history in the world,The ChristianFamily Chronicle; under Mr. Geyer's name: 'I wish to learn aboutJohn and Jane (Lord) Christian whose daughter Catherine was born 15thAugust 1813 in German Parish, Peel, Isle of Man, and died there, 23rdOctober 1899. Catherine married 9th July, 1838 Robert Gracey.'
Mr. Geyer's letter to Mrs. Lyle reveals that he is a grandson ofyoung Robert, who had a brother Thomas. He writes: 'According tofamily legend Thomas went to Utah, with a Mormon aunt about 1852,when he was 10 years old. The aunt died on the way. Perhaps he walkedto Utah with the Mormons. I can find no record. However, in May 1860,Thomas was in Douneyville, California, in the gold fields and hadsent for his younger brother, Robert. He travelled out by clippership to New York, and round the Horn to California., taking 90 dayson the trip. An Indian uprising in Nevada called for volunteers toprotect Virginia City in May 1860, and both boys volunteered and wentto Virginia City. Later both served the community in several civicoffices, including assessor constable, tax collector, Justice of thepeace and US commissioners. Thomas died in Butte, Montana., in 1910,and Robert in Reno, Nevada in 1934, aged 92. So there we are! See howlegends are born., Time conflates brothers, and puts dates to eventsthat belong to quite different circumstances Clearly the picture of achild waking all alone across the American continent with all itstear jerking accompaniment is the end product. But the facts werethat when the convoys of covered wagons rolled westward, most of themales walked all the way, and only the women and children rode in thewagons
However, two questions still remain. How did the cutting of the1930's get onto the plate? What indeed is the story of the plate?,And then there is Mr. Geyer's query about young Robert'sgrandparents. Can anyone in Peel add to the story?
[FPC - TheGracey familywere Peel Based, a Robert Gracey being noted as mariner/public houselicence holder from 1776, Thomas Gracey as tidesman in 1823, andJohn Thomas Caine states that hisuncle Robert Gracey also joined the Mormons. Robert died 1851 - themormon Aunt was possibly Jane Cubbon sister of his mother EllinorCubbon who is given as mother of a Mary Gracey with father John Gracey]
The President's House in Washington, DC, is, of course, nowuniversally known as The White House, for the coat of white paintgiven it at the time to cover the scars of its burning by Britishforces during the war of 1812. It was the home once of a Manx 'firstlady', the wife of President John Tyler, 10th President of the UnitedStates.
Letitia Christian, a descendant of early Manx settlers ofVirginia, married Captain John Tyler on March 20th, 1813, at CharlesCity County: Virginia, where both had been born and raised.Subsequently, he was elected to serve in the Virginia House ofDelegates, as a member of Virginia's Executive Council, as a memberfrom: Virginia in the US House of Representatives and later in the USSenate, and as Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 1836 hewas elected Vice President of the United States, and in 1841 upon thedeath of William Henry Harrison assumed: the Presidency. LetitiaChristian Tyler became the First Lady of the land, and it was in thefamous Blue Room of the White House that. their daughter, Elizabeth,was married in 1842. Although Tyler was to serve as President until1845, his success was saddened in 1842 with the death in the WhiteHouse of his wife Letitia Christian Tyler the Manx First Lady. .EDWARD SAYLE
Every Irish princeling of Celtic times historians have said, couldrecite his ancestry back to Adam, : many a Manxman has been drawn: togenealogy by the reflection that he too is Celtic, and his ownisland. being so much more compact and self sufficient, his taskshould be the easier . But of course, it has not proved so. True,.the Island is uniquely privileged having so many relevant documentsunder the one Museum roof, and must remain especially grateful forthe continuing services of the Mormon Church in making their contentsso readily available there on microfilm. But the thrill of having somuch so near only deepens the frustration of realising how relativelylittle help that great collection may be able to offer usindividually. The microfilms of few parish records stretch furtherback than 1700, and they come to an uneven end somewhere in thelatter half of the 19th Century Within those limits a fairlycomprehensive canvas island wide and nearly 200 years long. Yet likethe documents that make it up, that canvas has its holes and stains,due to human laxity or disinterest. They are fortunate researcherswho can trace their roots with certitude far into the 17th Century,and any sort of sure knowledge before the compilation of the earliestManorial Rolls for the Stanleys about the end of the 15th Century isa rare matter of happy chance. The most impressive of any display offamily trees tend to show dotted lines towards the top. Blessed, wemay say, are the Clagues who point to an Ogham inscription of thedark ages to certify their ancient tenure of a quarterland. But acynic might wonder, did no one ever play Selsdon Man tricks in ourIsland? And even if J.J. Kneen suggests an etymological connectionbetween your surname and hieroglyphics on a Gault Cross, ortransliterates word in the Manx Chronicle into it, that hardlysatisfies the College of Heralds
The Moment of such personal disillusion is a major crisis. It isso easy to lose both all heart and all interest. Yet equally it couldbe the moment when our eyes are opened to a broader and moresatisfying vista of Family History, a when we get a second wind to goon. Hitherto we see, we have regarded genealogy as a very personalthing MY family. Now we realise that our frustration is largely dueto the very size of that family, and the fact that our own outlinesare blurred into it, and that we cannot distinguish the individualthread in its make up which is our self, merely makes the whole of itvery much more ours. There is a new and a better thrill in the studyof US rather than of just ME. Indeed the study of ME and MINE canultimately issue in Narcissism .
At any rate; that is what has happened to me. My interest is in WEKISSACKS, and I want to offer my experience in embarking on such astudy to all of you, in the hope that some of you mill be interestedenough to do the same for your own Manx surname Mine is not thegreatest of the tribes of Man. How much more worthwhile would he astudy of the Corletts who flourish like scutch grass on the face ofour island? Why have some families soared into the aristocracy, andothers continued for generations as though they had never been born,quite without memorial
Years ago I found myself paging through an early Manx Societypublication my father happened to have in the house, and reading listafter list of the Houses of Keys, and finding a question form in mymind that one day I'd like to solve. It was: Why was there hardlyever a Keys without at least one of the family in it, until about1640, since when I do not believe there has ever been a bearer of thename to be an M.H.K? I used to wonder who was the bearer of the namethat adorned the fascia board of that great Grocer's shop in Douglas,and since has multiplied itself all ever: the island and got itselfon to innumerable plastic bags?Andwho was responsible for the name of Engine No. 13? For alone ofall those names canonised in the world flung millennium leaflets asManx, we have had an IoM Ry engine to bear that name for us, anengine, (I noted as well) that started out its life in the same yearI did my own. (I have since discovered the highly significanteconomic and social fact that in gaining that glorious brass andgreen(or red) mechanical memorial, nothing helped more than to havethe Grocer for father!). And at the other end of the scale, Old St.Peter's in Peel has been a place of secret pilgrimage, to look on thepiece of broken slate affixed inside the eastern gable, whereon anunpractised hand his chiselled a memorial to Elin Kisig. Theheartless stone had cruelly broken just under the laboriouslycompleted first line and so the second had to be cut over the first.Will I ever know whose daughter she was, or who thus mourned her?What sort of people have Kissacks been? Where do we all come from?What is the origin of our name?
Having once decided that my study should be of We and not of Me, Ibegan to collect every piece of information I. could find about thenone. Especially I began systematically to collate from the Museummicrofilms every occurrence of the name in its various forms in theParochial records. The Mormon indexes of baptisms and Marriages hasmade this a relatively simpler task, although completeness demandsreeling through the transcripts of the registers themselves, sincethe indexes were prepared by workers in Utah who had imperfect ideasabout Manx family conventions and the spelling of Manx names. But byand large for statistical analysis the indexes are sufficient. It isJust a matter of copying down parish by parish lists already compiledfrom the registers. In the end, you will have all to hand in yournote books a cross section of the family history, island wide and acentury and a half in length.
The exercise may low move into your own home, no longer dependenton rare and uncomfortable peering into the museum scanners. You willhave every baptism under the name listed in chronological order, andthey can easily be counted and tabulated, parish by parish, and Isuggest decade by decade. in additional refinement would be to breakdown the figures into male and female. But it will be very easy toturn it all into a neat table, one axis for parishes, the other fordecades, which totted up will tell you how many baptisms have beenregistered in each parish, and how those births have occurred acrossthe century' end a half.
Of course, it will only be when someone from every one of thoseMillennium publicity listed families (and no doubt others too) havejoined in the exercise that we will begin to be able to Fleesignificant demographic comparisons. But as it is now it is worthnoting down the figures printed at the end of every parish index inthe Mormon microfilms, which give the overall totals of baptisms (andmarriages) for that parish. We thus get one very useful control forour studies. You will find that there have been getting on for200,000 baptisms recorded in our parishes, varying from some 17,000for German to something over 4,000 in Bride, and perhaps a quarter ofthe whole is accounted for by the Douglas parishes. Male baptismssystematically exceed female by about 3% of the total.
These figures will provide you with a statistical map of theIsland and its population history, against which your own family'soutlines can take shape. It also is useful to make a list of thecensus figures for the Island which go beck in one form or another to1726, for these will also add depth to the significance of your ownfigures If you like making graphs you can plot the rise of the Islandpopulation in general, and lay on it the graph of the decade totalsof your family births, so seeing if your family kept up or lostground to the growth of the Island.
My first interest was to discover the variations in density of myfamily's population across the Island. By dividing the grand total ofall the baptisms on the Island by the family total, I realised thatevery boy end every girl who was born onto our Mann alive had aboutone chance in 173 of being baptised a Kissack. If however, they choseRushen or Ballaugh for their parish their chances would have droppedto 3666 or 3550 to 1 respectively, as a parallel use of the figureswould show, whereas the odds would have increased in Lezayre to 58:l,in Santon: and Maughold to 57:1 and in Jurby to 50:1 In Douglas; itwould have been 250:1 but in Ramsey only 88:1. Indeed the Fourparishes of Andreas, Jurby, Lezayre and Maughold enclosing andincluding Ramsey, account for well nigh half the total of Kissackbaptisms, although their share of the total overall baptismal figuresis only between one quarter and onto fifth.
This little exercise had thus given me the equivalent of abackward view of nearly 300 years of our family and enabled me torecognise that we are in origin undoubtedly a Northside family,despite the fact that the one quarterland to bear the family name,and that. going back into the 17th Century is Ballakissack in Santon.Santon indeed scores high in baptisms 88,but Malew, Arbory and Rushenbetween them register only 52, as against the impressive 539 for the4 northern parishes mentioned above
No less intriguing are the places where the name is rare Rushenshows 17 decades with not one Kissack baptism. Even more perplexingis Ballaugh, which despite its adjacency to Lezayre, Jurby andAndreas records only one family baptism in 140 years And there isappends' to this entry a notice. to the effect that this family werefrom Lezayre , and only came because the floods of the Sulby riverthat January Sunday in 1762 prevented them getting to their ownparish. Church. Moreover Rushen and Ballaugh are the only 2 parishesin the 1515 edition of theManorialRoll to show Kissacks as owners of quarterlands. Yet preciselywhere we would expect to find them best established, theirdisappearance is most complete.
Bride, one might think; of as firmly part of that. northern block of the family homelands; nevertheless it records no Kissack baptisms. in 14 decades of registers. Then three entries in the decade 1841 1850 are followed by 2 empty decades, and only. in the 1870's does there appear settled signs of the family. I call these empty periods 'nil decades', And they can tell us facts about the family analogous to the bird watcher's records of nests and breeding pairs. They tell us whether young married couples are there or not. To go three (even two) decades with nil returns strongly suggests that there can be no family presence at all, and if figures recommence, we have the interesting problem of discovering where the family came from. Even Andreas recorded 6 nil decades between 1740 1800. So too, Arbory has only one baptism in 9 decades, German has 6 nil decades ( 1700 1760) Malew in the 19th Century shows nil between 1830 and 1860, and Michael 7 nil decades in 18th and four in the 19th.
Patrick poses another sort of problem after one sole entry (in the18th Century) in 12 decades, suddenly in the 1820's a populationexplosion of Kissacks begins, and by 1880 the score is 43. This isclearly associated with the mines.
The habitats of the family were in some nine parishes. Lezayregoes 20 decades without a nil, Maughold has only one nil in 19decades, as does Braddan, 'Santon has only 1 nil (1791 1800) in 21decades of records Douglas and . Marown have only 2 nils in 19decades, and Onchan 5. Jurby only enters the records in 1730, andRamsey in 1750; but show no nils afterwards.
Where, as in these perishes, there are continuos figures . It is useful to make a graph of the decade counts, preferably against a plot of the general population figures. I have found that some parishes will have a higher profile than others The towns may have a high profile, which may reflect the mobility of a town population, greater perhaps, than in the agricultural areas. In the country the greatest stability of continuance is provided by the owner farmer.
The Kissacks have only had two holdings persisting from the earliest recorded Ballakissack; in Santon and Kerrowmoar in the Abbeylands of Lezayre. Although both these families disappear from these estates about the 1880's the profiles of the two parishes show a contrast. Lezayre was a prolific parish in the 18th Century, recording 113 baptisms in the Century, peaking to 20 in the decade 1751 1760, but it was declining by 1800, and although the score for the decade 1841 1850 is 9, the presence of the name was fading fast after that. Santon on the other hand has a strongly continuing low profile. Over 21 decades its average is 4; its high is 8. There were not so many Kissack families in Santon, but the Ballakissack: family held its own economically and genetically better than Kerrormoar.
Most of the Kissacks in the; period were agricultural labourers. Though these might not move as frequently as town labourers, move they had to, especially the adolescent, and peaks and lows reflect this. But the study of the family's other occupations is another exercise, and when the records of the lash Century censuses are collated with such figures as we deal with here, the family portrait takes on further detail and colour.
R. Kissack
[note Rev R.Kissack subsequently wrote two books about theKissack Family:
Seed of Isaac [1985] (now out of print) includinggenealogical tables
The MacIsaacs : possible origins of a Scots-Manx surname[1991]
both published Douglas by the Author.
Elizabeth Barlow of Matamata, New Zealand, has al readyestablished her name in Manx Family History in gathering the NewZealand Qualtrough clan together in 1979 . she visited the Isle ofMan in Summer 1980 as a first step in greater project no less thanlinking all the Qualtroughs of the world and maybe even tracing thefamily tree in its fulness,
she writes:
'In an initial meeting.and Genealogy attack',-I headed off to theReference Section of the nearest city Library. I had roped in theassistance of. two aunts who were both very interested in theproject. We took over the international phone directory section, andpoured over them looking for Qualtroughs and their addresses. Wereturned with 50 names and addreses gathered from the Isle of Man,England, Canada, USA and Australia, I returned home and drafted anintroductory letter and questionnaire. 72$ was outlaid for postageand in early May 50 letters were in the post.Now all I had to do wasto wait; but not for long.
Fortified by supportive and even enthusiastic replies fromEngland, 'foront~, k~custon and elsewhere we spent three hectic weekson the Island.
I endeavoured to contact as many Qualtroughs as possible. Those I met and who entertained me with typical Manx hospitality, were able te give me a lot of information fir. John. Qualtrough of Braaid had been searching the family for many years during his employment at in the Rolls Office, so we had and still have much to share.Mr. John K. Qualtrough of Cronkbourne Avenue,Douglas, told me all he knew of his family history, and showed his appreciation of my work by giving me a water-colour of Bradda Head which he had painted himself. Misses Grace and Evelyn Qualtrough of Colden Road, Douglas were thrilled to exchange information with me. I was able to put them in touch with distant relatives in Canada who had answered my questionnaire. The Misses Qualtrough were able to tell me of their family's involvement in the Qualtrough ship-building yard in Douglas. Their grandfather, William, had built the 'Goldseeker', sailed it out to Australia in the early 1850's, married Eleanor Gawne in Geelong, had a daughter there, and shortly afterwards returned to start the Qualtrough Soft-drink firm to keep the work-force employed during the winter. In due course the shipyard was closed, but the drinks firm continued.
Mr. Ian Qualtrough, son of Sir Joseph, Speaker of the House ofKeys for many years; and owner of J. Qualtrough & Co. Ltd.,Timber Merchants, trapsed me through the Rushen, Malew and Arborychurchyards looking for Qualtrough graves. We must have found near ahundred, which I photographed, or transcribed, depending on thecondition of the headstone . Ian told me much of his ancestry, andintroduced me to what was to me the quaint and unusual system theManx had for nick naming their people. I heard of Jo-Bill-JoQualtrough, Dick the Bumble, etc. This put a new light on researchfor me as it gave it a bit of a human touch.
Elizabeth came back to New Zealand in August to a hugebox full ofQualtrough mail.
Some of the new lineages I have received I have been able to slotnicely into my research and family tree. Others I am expecting togive me quite a lot of hard work ahead, as very little is knownespecially by several Qualtroughs in America. Correspondence in allcases continues to Great Britain and North America, as I ask them allfor further information. They are in many cases, on first name terms,and feel as if we had known each other for years.
Our Journal then most gladly offers itself in anto her appeal:
'Please can you assist me in my project to contact with QUALTROUGHS, and also gather QUALTROUGH references. If overseas members check their PHONE DIRECTORIES, and/or ELECTORAL ROLLS for addresses, and send me any they can locate, I would most appreciate it. I bellieve there is a big congregation of Manx descendants in OHIO. Can anyone give me a contact in that area? Perhaps a Manx Society? If members in the Isle of Man are transcribing (or just walking through) churchyards/cemetaries and come across any Qualtrough headstones, a transcription be most appreciated. (Note that Rushen, Onchan and Malew have been thoroughty done). If you are reading Census Returns or parish Record of any of the other 14 parishes orators, and across any Qualtrough references, these would be very thankfully received. Any expenses will be gladly refunded. Please send info:to:
ELIZABETH BARLOW Banks Road, Matamata,
New Zealand
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