Middle: Susan CROKER

 The further into this challenge I get the more difficult it is to decide which ancestor to write about. The prompt Middle is so well…. Middling. 

So I went to the middle page of my ‘Blue Book’, the one I wrote about in week thirteen ,and looked for those ancestors I hadn’t yet written about. I didn’t quite close my eyes and stab a pin into an entry, but it was pretty close to that. And who have I chosen?

Susan Crocker who was one of my maternal great great grandmothers. She was the fifth child of twelve children born to Thomas Crocker and his wife Catherine Shinick, both Irish born. Though I do not know why or when they left Ireland but they had been living in Gloucestershire, England at least since the birth of their first recorded child in 1831.Susan  was baptised on a Sunday.

Roman Catholic.  Colston Avenue, St Mary-on-the-Quay. Baptisms 1828-1840
Born 01/08/1836 Baptised 07/08/1836

Bristol, England, Non-Conformist Baptism, Marriage and Burial Registers, 1644-1981 

Baptisms for other Crocker children

https://www.ancestry.com.au/search/collections/61689/name=_Crocker&birth=1831&baptism=_bristol-gloucestershire-england-united+kingdom_202043&birth_x=10-0-0&count=50&father=Thomas&mother=Catherine&name_x=s_psx

St Mary-on-the-Quay is a Roman Catholic church (Diocese of Clifton) and was completed in 1840. The architect was Richard Shackleton Pope. The River Frome flows in front of the church but was covered over in 1893.

St Philip and St Jacob Church is considered to be the oldest continually worshiping church in Bristol; there has been Christian worship on the site since 980 A.D.)

Date: Circa 1920s; Photographer: Unknown; Publisher: Haywards, 1 Corn Street, Bristol.

https://stphilipandstjacob.com/history#today 

On the 1841 census is Susan aged 6 living with her parents and four siblings at ‘Narrow Plain’ in the parish of St Philip and St Jacob, Gloucestershire. !841 was the year that the rail line between Bristol and London was completed.  

 The street called Narrow Plain exists today as does the Church of St Mary-on-the-Quay just a fifteen-minute walk away from Narrow Plain.

By the time of the 1851 census, Susan now aged 15, along with her mother Catherine, and three of her siblings are lodgers in what must have been a crowded household at number 3 Hume Row, Plaistow.  The large number of people living in what was likely to be a relatively small terraced house was by no means unusual for the time.  

Bear with me while I try to explain the connection. Head of the house Daniel Hayes was married to Debrah, who was Catherine’s sister. At this stage I have no idea where her husband Thomas or son Richard were. The only possible death for a Thomas Crocker is in the last quarter of 1851. The census that year was in March. The research to check that out will be done when I write about Thomas.

 Their living conditions would have been awful 12 people crammed into what was very likely a small terraced house that was unlikely to have had running water. At the time the nearby Thames was a stinking open sewer and with horse drawn transport crowding the streets the roads in and around London would have been awash with horse poo and urine. The combination of that alongside the foul-smelling chemical works would have been almost intolerable. It is no wonder that there were frequent outbreaks of typhoid and cholera.

 By the time of the next census in 1861 Susan had married Irish born Andrew Dwyer and you can read about them both at https://they-are-my-kin.blogspot.com/search/label/DWYER%20Andrew%20c1837%20-%201895

Her date of death is as yet unknown, but I do know that it was  it was after the 1901 census when she would have been 68 years old.