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!

Eight Kisby Lines

Computer is on the blink, which has spurred me to get some of my Kisby records in order. I've been writing up some of the Kisby lineages from which we all descend. In fact, we Kisby's seem to descend from a surprisingly few 18th century families.

The Kisbee's across the world all descend, by one route or another, from Thomas Kisbee of Barnwell, Northamptonshire.

There were Kisby's in Ulster during the 19th century, they may be linked to the 18th century Kisbey's of Dublin. Or maybe not.

From what I can see, the remainder of us seem to result from only eight English Kisby families from the 1700's. Three of them have strong links to the Fenland market town of Whittlesey and may, in turn, be connected to one another. Two families originate from close to the city of Peterborough. There is then another cluster around the east of Northamptonshire and neighbouring Huntingdonshire, which may have a connection at some point (I expect they moved down from the Peterborough area).

All in all, not many families at all, which is useful for yours truly when I write them up.

15 Days - 15 Collections

In an imaginative mood, Ancestry.com have been giving free access to 15 different sets of records, for for the first 15 days of October only. "15 days - 15 FREE collections" has ended now, but I tried to use the opportunity to go Kisby-hunting.

Unfortunately Ancestry's records have a repuation for being badly transcribed. I've tried on several occasions to search the US Census records for Kisby's but rarely with success. For example, the 1920 Census (part of the "15 days" release) should contain dozens of Kisby's but according to the index search there are none! In their defence, the US was populated by immigrants from all nationalities, many of them with unusual unexpected surnames to confuse the transcribers.

So I chose to extract as many KISBY, KISBEE and KISBEY births from the 1916-2005 England & Wales Birth index. I managed to complete the task for the 30 years from 1963 to 1993 (which included the birth entries for my sister and me). Noticeably, during this period, there are almost NO Kisby's born in the old stomping grounds of the English Fens!

Westminster Wedding

What a pleasant experience it was to visit the Westminster Archives last week! They are located on the top floor of a modern red brick building, only a few minutes walk from London's Westminster Abbey.

I'd gone to the archives because I spotted a reference online to a marriage of James Kisbee in the Church of St Margaret. It turns out that St Margaret's is immediately next door to Westminster Abbey and, presumably, must have had some elevated status as a result! The parish register of the 1770's was a lovely document, also including a contemporary hand written index of all surnames.

James Kisbee married Catherine Holme in July 1774. He is most likely to be the same James Kisbee as the one was employed by the Duchess of Montagu. James knew the famous black writer, Ignatio Sancho, who ran a grocery business in Westminster.

James and Catherine produce a daughter later in 1774 but afterwards the trail runs dry. Either they moved to another parish, or maybe something untoward happened to Catherine?

Kisby-ee-ey

Greetings to anyone who stumbles across this blog. It is a continuation of my Vox.com blog, The Kisblogger.

There were approximately 350 Kisby's, Kisbee's and Kisbey's listed in the England & Wales 1881 census. Nowadays there are probably over 1,000 worldwide. Most of us will have ancestors that originated in the East of England, around the English Fenlands, but there are also Kisbey's from Ireland and Kisby's from Denmark. I'm interested in tracing the origins of the English Kisby's in particular so if anyone wants to help then I'd love to hear from you.