The Hampshire Family Historian | Vol.49 No.3 | December 2022

Member’s article

Elizabeth died at Chatham on 19 March 1835, while Walter lived until 1855. We learn from the 1851 census that Walter was born at Norham (on the Tweed) in Northumberland – his baptism was on 20 August 1775 at the Presbyterian Church in Etal, and he was recorded as the son of Abraham and Jane Marshall of Felkington, a few miles south of Norham. Possibly he worked at Berwick before moving to Portsea. Henry Marshall was Walter and Elizabeth’s second and eldest surviving son. He was born at Portsea in 1811, and followed his father’s occupation as a shipwright. He married Ann Pett at East Malling in Kent in 1833. They had 5 children in the Medway area before moving in the 1840s to Deptford, where 3 more children were born. Henry’s address was 175 Evelyn Street, Deptford, Kent, when he appeared in Winchester on 20 August 1855. His attendance was to establish that, as the next of kin of his parents, he was entitled to his mother’s share of her father James Dance’s estate. Having stated that his parents had died intestate and that his mother’s estate had been unadministered, he was granted administration of their estates and requested to submit accounts within 6 months. It was stated in these documents that he believed the value of his parents’ estates to be less than £200. This was witnessed by William Dance, cutler and Robert Mitchell, hairdresser, both of Portsea. William was Henry’s first cousin (his father, also a cutler called William, died in 1845), while Robert Mitchell was his uncle, the husband of his aunt Jane Dance.

The distribution of the rest of James Dance’s estate was not straightforward. His son William had made a Will in 1845 in which, as the last survivor of his father’s executors, he passed responsibility for the execution of his father’s estate to his brothers-in-law Henry Adams (a grocer at Catherington) and Robert Mitchell, as his son William was then a minor aged 19 (to whom his share subsequently passed). His brother David Henry (only called Henry in his father’s Will and the resulting administration), a coach spring maker of Portsea, had died unmarried and intestate in 1835, and his share of his father’s estate was granted in 1855 to his sister Mary Ann Adams, as his next of kin. Their elder sister Eliza also died in 1835 and the administration of her estate was granted in 1840 to her husband William Cowan (a carpenter); as a Scot from Midlothian he was another recent immigrant to Portsea. The estate of James Dance was only finally settled in 1857, 28 years after his death, when the fate of his eldest son James, who had gone missing at the time he wrote his Will, was discovered. It appears that James, now referred to as James Henry Dance, writer of Madras, had gone to India and died there in 1845, intestate and a widower; “writer” was a term used for clerks employed by the East India Company. He had one son, Charles Henry, born in Madras in 1815, who had died before him in 1843 and two surviving granddaughters, who then became the beneficiaries of their great grandfather’s Will. The elder, Adelaide Matilda, had married John MAXWORTH (also a writer) in 1851 and was

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