Dorothy Bennett and her Ancestors

Eliza Smith née Oakley (1814 to 1850)

Eliza Smith née Oakley was the mother of Rose Dorothy Bennett’s grandfather Frederick Smith.


The villages of Medstead and Ropley are in the north-eastern part of the county of Hampshire, more or less equidistant from Winchester, Petersfield, and Farnham. Ropley is about four miles east of Alresford.

Medstead is underlined on the map, and Ropley is marked with a red capital R

Eliza Oakley was baptised in Ropley on the 1st of May 1814. Her parents were Thomas Oakley, a labourer, and Ann Money. Thomas and Ann had been born and brought up in Medstead, and married there on the 27th of July 1794, but they moved to Ropley soon afterwards. They lived there in an area known as “The Soake”.

Eliza had two older sisters, Rebecca (born 1796) and Mary (born 1799). She also had an older brother called William, born in 1802. She almost certainly had other brothers and sisters but their names are currently not known.


George Smith was born in New Alresford where his father, William Smith, was a blacksmith. As a young man, George lived in London with his older sister Charlotte and her husband Cornelius Knight, and while he was there he learnt to be a baker. Eliza may have known George, the son of the blacksmith, before she moved to London. Or perhaps her family knew Cornelius Knight, who came from Bishops Sutton which is between Alresford and Ropley. But in either case, Eliza and George were both staying with the Knight family in Marylebone High Street when they got married in May 1838. The ceremony was at the parish church in Marylebone, and the Knights were the formal witnesses.

George and Eliza lived in New Alresford where George had a baker’s shop in West Street, and their three children were born there. Frederick was born the year following their marriage, Charlotte a year later, and Robert in 1844, four years after Charlotte.

Eliza died in 1850 when she was only about 36 years old. She was buried in New Arlesford on the 16th of October.

After Eliza died, George continued to live at the baker’s shop with his two youngest children. His unmarried sister Hannah moved in as housekeeper. The oldest child, Frederick, went to live in London with his Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Charlotte, where George himself had lived as a young man.

George died three and a half years after Eliza, leaving the children as orphans. Frederick continued to live with his uncle and aunt in London and the two younger children went to live with George’s sister Eliza and her husband William Pewsey, who was a cooper in Alresford.


To read about Eliza’s children click on the following link — The Children of Eliza Oakley and George Smith



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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.