Sidney Alfred Parsons and his Ancestors

Isaac Parsons (1835 to 1875)

Isaac Parsons was an uncle of Sidney Alfred Parsons, the person at the root of the family tree described in these web pages.

He was born in Marston Magna in South Somerset in the year 1835 and was baptised there on the 26th of March. His parents were Edward Parsons and his wife Elizabeth (née Taylor).


Isaac was his parents’ third child and their eldest son. Their first children were twin girls, Jane and Elizabeth, but Jane sadly did not survive more than a couple of months. Isaac was born just over two years later. He had a younger sister called Jane who was born about a year later and a brother, James, four years after that. Four more children followed the youngest of whom, Martha, was born in 1850.

Isaac’s grandfather Charles Parsons, who died when Isaac was 11, lived at Manor Farm and was the wealthiest farmer in the village but in his will he made no provision for Isaac’s father Edward or his children and Edward worked as a labourer.

When Isaac was born his parents were lodging with an elderly widow called Sarah Cooper and her daughter and granddaughter. When Isaac was about 5 years old the family moved about ten miles away to the Redlynch Manor estate near Bruton where Edward found work as a gamekeeper but within four years they were back in Marston Magna and Edward was an agricultural labourer again.

Isaac’s parents Edward and Elizabeth lived in Marston Magna for the rest of their lives.

 


Isaac lived with his parents until he was 26 years old when he married. His wife was the village schoolmistress, Jane Cupper. The Cupper family had originated in Weston Bampfylde, about two miles away, but Jane had been born in Marston Magna where her father was an army pensioner who worked as a gardener. Her mother was Irish. A few years earlier Jane and Isaac had been witnesses at Isaac’s sister Jane’s wedding.

Isaac and Jane’s wedding in the parish church was on the 23rd of April 1861.

Isaac and Jane’s first child, Isaac William, was baptised privately on the 9th of June 1862. There is no indication why the baptism was not carried out in church; it is possible but by no means certain that the boy might have been too unwell to attend church.

Their marriage was breaking down and they were soon living apart. Jane worked as a lady’s maid for a Mrs. Cox in Weymouth and Jane and her son first son lived there with her. She had a second son, Louis Henry, who had been born in Herefordshire where Jane’s brother Joseph lived. Louis was baptised in Weymouth but then lived with his grandfather John Cupper.

In the meantime Isaac had left Marston Magna to join his sister Elizabeth in Southampton where her husband William Sly was a publican. Isaac’s brother John soon joined them in Southampton and lived with Elizabeth and her husband.

Isaac decided to become a publican too and became the landlord of the Surrey Hotel in Orchard Road. When the 1871 census was taken he told the enumerator he was un-married even though his wife was alive and well in Weymouth.

In 1874, on an election, day Isaac was witness to a riot in Southampton in which his brother John, who by then was also a publican, was severely injured by a policeman whilst defending his pub fom the mob. In the subsequent assault hearing against Constable Daniel Coleman the magistrates were unable to obtain positive proof that it was indeed him that struck the blows so the constable was acquitted.

In December of that year Isaac’s mother Elizabeth died in Marston Magna.

It seems that Isaac might have turned to drink because he developed liver disease from which he eventually died. He gave up his own pub and worked for his brother John as an “inkeeper’s assistant”.

Isaac’s death occurred at his brother’s pub, the Blue Boar Inn in Southampton, on Christmas day 1875 after an illness which lasted for six weeks. He was only 40 years old.

Five years later Isaac’s widow Jane, who still lived in Weymouth, married again. Her new husband was a butler called William Trim. For many years they ran a lodging house in Weymouth. She died there in 1925.

Isaac and Jane Parsons’ children

  •  Isaac William Parsons — Isaac and Jane’s first child, Isaac William Parsons, was born in Marston Magna and baptised there on the 9th of June 1862. Soon afterwards his mother left Isaac’s father to go and work as a lady’s maid in Weymouth. His first baptism had been done privately and Jane had him baptised again in Weymouth on the 16th of July 1865. When Isaac was 13 years old his father, who was living in Southampton, died and five years later his mother married again. Isaac’s stepfather was William Trim. As a boy Isaac sometimes lived with his mother and sometimes with his grandfather John Cupper in Marston Magna. As a young man he became a soldier and, according to his brother’s journal, served with the 75th foot regiment. After leaving the army he settled in Yeovil and worked as a clerk and traveller for a brewery. He preferred to be called William rather than Isaac. In 1891 he married Emily Hunt in Weymouth and he and Emily lived there for the rest of their lives. He died in 1938. William and Emily had three children:

1) Margaret was born in Yeovil in 1891 but she was baptised in Weymouth. She lived with her parents until 1927 when she married Sidney Herbert White. Sidney and Margaret kept a boarding house in Yeovil until they retired and went to live in Castle Cary. Sidney died there in 1963 and Margaret in 1978.

2) John was born in Yeovil on the 8th of April 1894 and he was also baptised in Weymouth. He joined the army and in 1917, in Coventry, he married Esmeralda Thirza Gray. He left the army with a disability pension but nevertheless worked as a motor mechanic. He and Esmeralda settled in Yeovil until he died there in 1947. She died in Hornchurch, East London, in 1965.

3) Arthur Edward was also born in Yeovil and baptised in Weymouth. He found work in the engineering department of Petters’s Nautilus Works, a company which made fire-grates and ranges. In 1915 he enlisted and served with the Suffolk Regiment. He saw heavy action in France and Flanders on several occasions and was killed on the 26th of September 1917 in the Battle of Polygon Wood. He was buried at the Tyne Cot cemetery.

  •  Louis Henry Parsons — was born in Herefordshire in December 1864 while his mother was staying with her brother Joseph who who lived there and worked as a gardener. At the age of 15 Louis joined the Royal Navy as a “Boy Seaman, 2nd class” on the training ship Implacable moored at Devonport. Louis was in the Navy for 22 years during which time he kept a journal. He was invalided out of the Navy at the end of 1901 and went to live at his mother and step-father’s boarding house in Weymouth. There, in 1902, he married his cousin once removed, Julia Marion Horder, who worked in the boarding house. The following year their only child, Cecil, was born and two years later Louis died. Marion and their son continued to live in the boarding house for some years but by 1939 they were staying in her niece Margaret Louise White’s husband’s boarding house in Yeovil. Marion died in Yeovil in 1959.

Louis’s life and career in the Royal Navy are documented in his own web pages at: Louis Henry Parsons and Louis Henry Parsons’ journal.

Louis and Marion’s only child, Cecil William John Cooper Parsons, was born and baptised in Weymouth in 1903. He worked as a clerk and lived with his mother until, in 1947, he married Violet Mabel Ostler in Chard in Somerset. She had been born in East Coker, near Yeovil, the youngest of ten children. Her second oldest brother, Sidney Ostler, a private in the Somerset Light Infantry, had been killed in action in Flanders in 1915 and is commemorated on the Menin gate in the city of Ypres. Cecil passed away in East Coker in September 1963. Violet died 15 years later.



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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.