Sidney Alfred Parsons and his Ancestors

Jane Trim, previously Parsons, née Cupper (1837 to 1925)

The Cupper family’s connection with the Parsons’s is through Jane Cupper whose first husband was Isaac Parsons, an uncle of Sidney Alfred Parsons who is the person at the root of the family tree described in these web pages.

Jane was born in Marston Magna in Somerset in 1837 and baptised there on the 17th of September. She was a daughter of John Cupper, a retired soldier who worked as a gardener, and his Irish wife Eleanor. John was a local man having been born in Weston Bampfylde which is about 3 miles to the north of Marston Magna. He and his family lived in Camel Street near to the centre of Marston Magna.

Jane was the youngest of ten children and was almost 20 years younger than her eldest sister Mary Ann.

In 1853, when she was 16 years old, Jane’s brother Richard Cupper died. He had trained as a teacher with the National Education Society in Westminster and probably taught at the school they had built in Marston Magna in the 1840s. The society, affiliated to the Church of England, had been established in 1811 with the aim of providing as many children as possible with an education based on the church’s teachings. The schools which they founded were known as National Schools. The school in Marston Magna is at the beginning of Camel Street near the church.

Jane, possibly inspired by her brother’s example, became a schoolmistress, almost certainly at the National School.

At the end of May in the year 1859 Jane attended the wedding of her friend Jane Parsons to Luke Vincent in Thornford in Dorset. Jane was one of the witnesses who signed the register; the other was the bride’s brother Isaac Parsons. Isaac lived with his parents in Camel Street very close to the Cuppers.

Two years later Jane married Isaac Parsons. Their wedding was in St. Mary’s Church in Marston Magna on the 23rd of April 1861.

Jane and Isaac’s first child, a son whom they named Isaac William, was born the following year. His baptism on the 9th of June was held privately.

They soon began to spend time apart. Three years later, when their second child, Louis Henry, was born, Jane was in Hereford where her brother Joseph lived with his wife and children and worked as a gardener. She then moved to Weymouth where she worked as a Lady’s maid for Mrs. Cox, a widow who had been born in Marston Magna. Jane’s niece, Ann Guppy, a daughter of her sister Mary Ann, also lived in Mrs. Cox’s household and worked as a housemaid. (Years later Ann Guppy’s daughter would marry Jane’s son Louis.) At the time of the 1871 census Jane’s son Isaac was living with her in Weymouth and Louis was staying with Jane’s parents in Marston Magna.

In the meantime Isaac had left Marston Magna to become a publican in Southampton. In the 1871 census he said that he was a single man.

In Weymouth Jane had her son Isaac baptised again, this time in public. Her second child Louis was also baptised there. In 1875 her husband Isaac died in Southampton of liver disease and she became free to marry again.

A tragedy occurred in March 1878 when Jane’s nephew Charles Dunn was lost when the ship upon which he was serving, HMS Eurydice, sank in what was one of Britain’s worst ever peace-time maritime disasters.

Five years after Jane’s husband had died she did marry again. Her wedding was on the 14th of December 1880 in Melcombe Regis, a part of Weymouth. Her new husband was William Trim and he worked as a butler. He was about six years younger then her and this was his first marriage. By the time they married Jane had known William for several years; in September 1877 she had been a guest at William’s brother Tom’s wedding in Kington Magna and she and William were witnesses.

At about that time Jane’s parents, John and Eleanor Cupper, moved from Marston Magna to Weymouth. Jane and her husband William lived with them but sadly it was not long before her mother Ellen died. And three years later her father passed away at the ripe old age of 94 years.

Jane and William became proprietors of a lodging house in Melcombe Regis. During the time they were there relatives would somtimes come and stay with them. Jane’s niece Julia Marion Horder (Ann Guppy’s daughter) was living and working there in 1891 and, for a while between 1895 and 1898, Jane’s son Louis, who was in the Royal Navy, lived with them while he was posted to a training ship at Portland. Later, after Louis had left the navy and married Marion Horder (she preferred to be called Marion rather than Julia), he and his family lived there. Louis died in 1905 but the 1911 census shows that that his widow Marion and their son Cecil were still living there at that time.

Jane died in Melcombe Regis early in the year 1925.

Jane Cupper’s children

Jane had two children with Isaac Parsons but none with her second husband William Trim.

Information about their lives can be found at Jane and Isaac Parsons’ children.

John and Eleanor Cupper

John and Eleanor Cupper were Jane Cupper’s parents.

John was baptised in Weston Bampfylde in Somerset on the 4th of July 1790, the first child of William Cupper and his wife Sarah (née Parker) whom he had married in South Cadbury in February of that year. William had been born in Weston Bampfylde in 1756 and at the start of their married lives he and Sarah lived there but later they moved a few miles away to Marston Magna.

Weston Bampfylde, South Cadbury and Marston Magna are villages in South Somerset which lie between Yeovil and Wincanton.

When John was 14 years old father his William died. And in 1807, three years later, his mother Sarah died too.

John became a soldier. He joined the second battalion of the 34th (Cumberland) Regiment of Foot as a private soldier. The battalion was fairly new having been raised raised just three years beforehand. In 1809 they travelled to Portugal to fight in the Peninsula campaign of the Napoleonic wars. In July 1814 the battalion embarked for Ireland and there John met an Irish girl called Eleanor (or Ellen) whom he married.

In April 1817 John’s battalion was disbanded. He returned to Marston Magna with Ellen where they lived on his small army pension supplemented by money he earnt working as a gardener. Their first child was born there at the end of that year.

John and Ellen Cupper had ten children of whom Jane, born in 1837, was their youngest.

By the 1870s all of their daughters had passed away except for Eleanor, their fourth child, and Jane who both lived in Weymouth on the Dorset coast. All of their sons had also passed away except for Joseph who lived in Wales and perhaps John whose whereabouts are unclear.

John and Ellen left Marston Magna for Weymouth where in April 1881, at the time of the census,they were living at number 13 Camden terrace.

Ellen died in Weymouth in May 1881. After John died there three years later he was buried in Marston Magna.

John and Eleanor Cupper’s children



John and Ellen had ten children between the years 1817 and 1837.

They were all born and baptised in Marston Magna.

  •  Mary Ann Cupper — Mary was John and Ellen’s first child. She was baptised on the 7th of December in the year 1817. When she was 29 years old she married Samuel Guppy, an agricultural labourer. Shan and Samuel lived in Marston Magna and had two children: Ann born in 1850 and John born in 1853. Mary passed away in June 1856. Two years later Samuel married again. He continued to live in Marston Magna until he died in 1886.

  •  John Cupper — John was baptised in August 1819 after which no record of him has been found.

  •  Joseph Cupper — Joseph was baptised in September 1821. By the time he was 20 years old he had left home and in 1841 he was a servant in the household of a clergyman called Henry Burney in Whatley in Somerset. (Whatley is near Frome.) Also living there was a servant girl called Ellen Pitman and in September 1842 Joseph married her. Ellen had originally come from South Cadbury which is only 3 or 4 miles from Marston Magna. Joseph and Ellen soon moved to Herefordshire where they lived in Titley near the border with Wales and he worked as a gardener. The first five of their seven children were born there. In 1860 Joseph and Ellen were living apart. He and his eldest son were boarding in Hereford where he worked as a gardener while Ellen and their other children were living in Abergavenny in Wales. By 1871 the family was together again; they were in the village of Clyro near Hay-on-Wye. Several of Joseph and Ellen’s children eventually moved to Draycott near Cheddar in Somerset and Ellen herself died there in 1892.

  •  Eleanor Cupper — Eleanor was born in 1823. In 1849, when she was 26 years old, she married a gardener called Harry Dunn. Their wedding was in Marston Magna. She and Harry lived for a while in Saffron Waldon in Essex where their first child, Henry, was born. Their second, Emma, was born in Islington in London. After that the family settled for a while in Gillingham in Dorset where Harry had been born but by 1871 they were living in Wyke Regis, a part of Weymouth in Dorset. Eleanor died there aged 47 in January 1872. The following year Harry married a woman called Annie Norris. Harry and Annie had nine children the last of whom was born in 1888.

Eleanor and Harry’s son Charles Richard Dunn was born in Gillingham in Dorset in 1858. In 1876 he enlisted in the Royal Navy where his first ship was the innovative steam powered armoured frigate HMS Warrior. When she was launched 15 years earlier she had been the largest and most advanced warship in the world. HMS Warrior is now on display and open to the public in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Charles’ second and last ship was the Eurydice which departed from Portsmouth in November 1877 for a tour of the West Indies. On her return, after a fast crossing of the Atlantic she was surprised by a sudden heavy snow storm off Sandown Bay on the the Isle of Wight. The ship capsized and sank with the loss of 314 crew and trainees. Five were rescued but only two survived. Charles went down with the ship. Many horrified witnesses on shore saw what happened and among them was a young Winston Churchill. The accident, which occurred on the 24th of March 1878 was one of Britain’s worst peace-time naval disasters. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins both wrote poems about the catastophy. There have since been many sightings of the ghost of a three masted sailing ship in the area, usually appearing on a misty day before disappearing without trace. In the 1930s a British submarine was forced to take evasive action to avoid colliding with a full-rigged three-master and when the submarine’s captain, Commander Lipscomb, looked again the ship had vanished. Prince Edward reportedly saw the ghost ship while filming a television documentary in 1998.

  •  Richard Cupper — Richard was baptised on the 20th of December 1825. By the time he was 16 he was working for and living with an 80 year old dairyman called John Williams. As a young man Richard trained as a teacher at the National Education Society’s training institute in Westminster in London. The society had been established by the Church of England in 1811. They built schools, trained teachers, and published text-books. Their work was helped by government grants. Their school in Marston Magna had been built in the 1840s. Richard probably taught there but not for long because less than two years after completing his training he passed away. He was buried in Marston Magna on the 12th of August 1853. He was only 28 years old.

  •  Sarah Cupper — Sarah, born in 1827, was the first of two of John and Eleanor’s daughters to be called Sarah. She was baptised on the 12th of February 1828 but died the following February. She was buried on her first birthday.

  •  William Cupper — John and Eleanor’s son William Cupper was baptised in February 1830 but passed away when he was only 15 years old. He was buried on the 21st of May 1845.

  •  Sarah Cupper — John and Eleanor’s second daughter to be named Sarah was baptised on the 1st of June 1832. She was only 16 when she passed away. She was buried in Marston Magna on the 30th of August 1848.

  •  Emanuel Cupper — Emanuel survived only three months. He was born in May 1833, baptised on the 1st of June, and died in September.

  •  Jane Cupper — John and Eleanor’s youngest child Jane was born in 1837. Details of her life can be found above.



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You are free to make use of the information in these web pages in any way that you wish but please be aware that the author, Mike Parsons, is unable to accept respsonsibility for any errors or omissions.

Mike can be contacted at parsonspublic@gmail.com

The information in these web pages comes from a number of sources including: Hampshire County Records Office, Somerset Heritage Centre; Dorset County Records Office; Southampton City Archives; the General Register Office; several on-line newspaper archives; several on-line transcriptions of Parish Register Entries; and several on-line indexes of births, marriages and deaths. The research has also been guided at times by the published work of others, both on-line and in the form of printed books, and by information from personal correspondence with other researchers, for all of which thanks are given. However, all of the information in these web pages has been independently verified by the author from original sources, facimile copies, or, in the case of a few parish register entries, transcriptions published by on-line genealogy sites. The author is aware that some other researchers have in some cases drawn different conclusions and have published information which is at variance from that shown in these web pages.