The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.2 | Sept 2023

Member’s article

born in 1852, was christened in Altarnun on 18th June of that year. Her father, Thomas Coombe Wadge, was the son of Truscott Wadge and had been born in 1825. In 1861 he was a copper miner. Copper mining was then in serious decline in the county, and therefore it is not surprising to find at the time of the 1881 census that his occupation was no longer recorded as copper miner. His daughter, Selina or Selena, who was a distant cousin of Florence Rose, never married but had at least two children. Life must have been hard for an unmarried servant girl in her late 20s. In 1878 she threw her two year old son, Harry, down a well and he drowned. On 15th August 1878 she was hanged for this offence. According to the plaque in the museum now housed in the former jail in Bodmin “ MARWOOD , the hangman, carried out the dread sentence of the law. At 8am the black flag was hoisted and Selina was launched into eternity. Her last words were ‘God deliver me from this wicked world’.” Erenst C’s early years of marriage appeared to be in a constant state of change. In terms of employment, not only was he referred to as being a hosier, but also an outfitter and a clothier. At some time during WW1, he apparently made his living as a hotel clerk. His wife during the war seemed to be frequently on the move without her husband. Either just before the war or at its beginning, it seems Ernest C had left Portsmouth on his own for North America. One record shows that Florence with her son, Ernest Barnes, sailed from Liverpool to arrive in New York on 30th August 1914. From there she travelled to

Canada to stay with a friend at 55 Augusta Street in Ottawa. She then sailed on to arrive in Quebec City on 13th October 1914. This second record revealed that Ernest C F was already in the USA. No record has yet been found to indicate when he actually left England. In 1915, Florence, with her son returned from New York to arrive in Liverpool and thence to 25 Westbourne Road in Portsmouth where Rene(e) was born. Ernest C and his family actually returned to North America but by 1920, having entered the USA from Canada, the whole family was living in rented accommodation in Detroit in Michigan. His occupation in the US census of 1920 was given as ‘road builder’. By 1930, he was in the auto industry working as an inspector. He died in the USA on 11th February 1936. His son Ernest Barnes, known as Jim, in the summer of 1935 married Detriot born Norma DRAG in Aplena on Lake Huron in Michigan relatively near the Canadian border, just under a year before his father’s death in Detroit. His daughter Rene(e), her second e was added after the family had emigrated, like her brother married an American. Her husband was James L ELLIS and he was born in Tennessee. Brother and sister had at least one child, both sons, and contact by email was established only briefly with Ernest Barnes’s Tom, who was born in 1939. Before ending this account, it is necessary to return to the two granddaughters of William George Dewey, namely Doris May and Irene Beryl. Their mother, Florence Rose, had been a widow since 1934 and by 1939 was running a wool shop in Portsmouth [102 Fawcett Road,

75