Wandering around Whittlesea

I treated myself last week to a holiday in the Cambridgeshire Fens and managed to visit a few Kisby and Kisbee haunts, including Farcet, Paston, Stamford ...and Whittlesea, of course. Whittlesea was the stomping ground of my Kisby ancestors for several centuries, until local postmistress Jean Kisby died in 2002.

I didn't come across any Kisby traces while I was there, despite trawling through almost the entire town cemetery. I also managed to look around the churchyard of St Andrew's Church, one of two ancient churches in the town, and the Kisby family church in the early years of the 1800s. The gravestones in the area are carved from some sort of limestone, which literaly dissolves over time, so anything dating before the 1880s that isn't protected from the weather is now illegible.

Outside of the large Wetherspoons pub, The George, on the Market Square, Whittlesea is also probably the quietest town in the east. The manned level crossing, next to the tiny railway station, was by far the most animated spot. When I visited Whittlesea in 1995 I went into the town museum and found the woman at the counter was related to me. Nowadays, the museum is only open for a few hours every Saturday (I was there on Thursday). I guess the tranquility is a feature of the Fensflat lands disappearing into the far distance, criss-crossed by drainage ditches and watercourses.

Looking at the map when I returned to my hotel, I did notice a Kisby Farm, to the east of Whittlesea near the hamlet of Turves. This is actually the farm occupied by my distant cousin Charles Kisby and his wife Sarah, around the turn of the last century. There is also a Kisby Level Crossing, on the line towards the town of March, likely to be named after another distantly related William Kisby. So the names live on, even though the people have long departed.

Leicestershire renegades

Before the 20th century things were much more simple for everyone. A man married a woman, the woman took on the surname of her husband, children were born in wedlock (or else incur tremendous shame), often the first son would be named after the father or grandfather. And so on. Very easy indeed for 21st century genealogists like me.

Very occasionally things happened differently. Thomas Kisby (1709 - 1765) of Barnwell, Northamptonshire, made a decision to spell his surname "Kisbee" and his son, Franklin, became the source of all today's Kisbees.

A century and three generations later, Charles Kisbee (born 1845 in Barnwell) moved to Leicestershire and evidently had some problem with the letter 'e'. He changed his family name back to "Kisby". His seven surviving children were born "Kisbee" but married as "Kisby" and (for 3 of them anyway) died as "Kisby". The eldest son Charles Kisby died in very unfortunate circumstances aged only 9 years old, after he found a bottle of liquid in a farm building and drank it, only to find it contained carbolic acid.

Leicester Asylum

Charles Kisbee's second eldest son, William Kisby, married Lucy Starmer in 1901. It seems a very tragic story for Lucy. Their second daughter, also Lucy, died before her second birthday. Maybe this tipped her poor mother over the edge, because Lucy Kisby ended up as an 'inmate' in the Leicester Asylum for many years. While his wife was a psychiatric patient, William Kisby decided to grow his family with another woman, Alice Stearn, who bore five Kisby children with him out-of-wedlock. In July 1918 Lucy Kisby died of TB, still at the Asylum, finally giving the opportunity for William to marry Alice Stearn almost exactly 3 months later. Will we ever know the full story to this unusual arrangement?

Not to be outdone by William, Charles Kisby/ee's youngest child, Ada Kisby, decided to plough her own unconventional furrow as well. Ada appears to bear children to John Harbot, a Leicester shoe manufacturer. John Harbot had already been married twice, his second wife (also an Ada) very much alive during this whole time. Ada Kisby remains unmarried and dies at the ripe age of 87 in Leicester,  no doubt surrounded by her children of many surnames!!

 

Pedigree ummmm

Earlier this century I came across a copy of the "Fovargue Family Indented Pedigree" on an auction website, so am now a proud owner. My great-great grandmother Elizabeth Kisby was born a Fovargue and, when I first visited the Cambridgeshire Kisby heartlands in 1995 I bumped into a distant Fovargue relative, completely by chance. The Fovargue Family Indented Pedigree was also published in 1995, well before the days of Ancestry or Findmypast. It runs to over 150 pages listing, describoing and indexing all Fovargues from 1513 to the (then) present day. It's a mammoth work, put together in the days when you were lucky to have a word processor, let alone a computer ...or the internet.

Kisby W1A_1940

 

The Fovargue Pedigree has tempted me to try and compile something similar for the Kisbys, Kisbees and Kisbies and Kisbeys. Things will be much easier with the proliferation of online and electronic resources these days. My Kisby research comprises an ever growing mixture of genealogy programmes, spreadsheets, electronic files and some hard copy material. I've always fancied the idea of creating a book and I think it's high time I pulled everything together into a digestible format ...though I struggle with the word 'pedigree', which conjures the idea of proving good breeding with the aim of creating a pure Kisby master race!!

My inner civil servant has prevailed and I've spent the dark winter evenings drawing up Kisby families into 'indented pedigrees'. The good news is that it's helped me fill some gaps, connect some strays and generally pull things together in one place. The bad news is that the dark evenings are getting shorter, the list of chores and competing tasks is beginning to grow, and it may be 2095 before I finish. But if anyone else likes the idea and wants to offer encouragement, well, please tell me. We may find out eventually we're well enough bred to enter Crufts!