My First Bits Of Luck

In 2015, prompted by attending my Alice's family reunion in June of that year, I decided to try and find out more about my ancestry. On my website I mentioned the names of my grandparents, Kate Loughborough and James Sedcole Watson, saying that I would welcome contact from anybody who knew of them. Within 3 months, on 19th November 2015, I got a reply from a lady, Carol, living in Melbourne, Australia, telling me that Kate and James were her great grandparents!! I think you can probably imagine how this turned my world upside down.  How could someone in Australia be the great granddaughter of my father's parents?  Carol and I are now very good friends, emailing almost daily, on all sorts of everyday things as well as our research.  We have met twice here in England during her visits to Europe.

My memories of Auntie May are of a slightly-built, fairly jolly lady who liked to drink, and also smoked too much. She always seemed to be singing the old song, (Frank Crummitt, 1926)

"Show me the way to go home

I'm tired and I want to go to bed

I had a little drink about an hour ago

And it's gone right to my head. "

She would have been nearly 60 when I was about 10 so she seemed very old.

(As an aside, many many years later I discovered the music of Frank Crummitt, including the 1934 line "...You can tell a man who boozes, by the company he chooses, and the pig got up and slowly walked away". On first hearing it sung, I remembered that my father used to recite that line, a propos nothing. It never meant anything to me at the time. I now think that May and my father must both have listened to Frank Crummitt.)

Carol in Australia, who coincidentally teaches genealogy, and has extensively researched her English roots, told me that she had discovered that my Auntie May had married and given birth to Carol's mother in 1940. She had then abandoned that child, which meant that Carol's mother grew up in care homes in Kent, in the years immediately after the war and into the 1950s.

Carol's mother died 30 years ago, in Australia, to where she and her husband emigrated in the early sixties with little Carol. To this day Carol knows very little about her mother's early life, and we are working together to try and uncover what we can but with very little success.

Needless to say Carol was very shocked to learn from me that Kate and James had had a third child, my father, Harry, 20 years after their two daughters. She had never thought to look as far ahead as the late 1920s. My dad, Harry was born in April 1928. Carol's genealogical experience and natural inquisitiveness made her investigate further and to cut a very long story short, (which I'm not doing very well), she managed to convince me that my dad Harry was actually the son of May, rather than the son of Kate. She obtained a birth certificate to show that May and a man called Thomas William Leggett had married in the autumn of 1927, so she must have been pregnant with my father at the time.

I then had to come to terms with the fact that my father's father was Thomas William Leggett, and not James Sedcole Watson.  It took many months for this to finally sink in, and I then became very enthusiastic about finding out more about Thomas Leggett's ancestry.  In 2016 I made contact with one of my sisters, who I had not seen since 1981. We eventually got round to the subject of our ancestry, and it seems that in 1985 Harry and my mother had decided to apply for 10-year passports to visit the United States. He of course was unable to produce a birth certificate in the name Harry Watson. This is all 30 years ago so my sister only has vague memories, but eventually he was able to get the passport, and break the news to my brother and twin sisters that he wasn't technically Harry Watson but Harry Leggett.  I think you can probably imagine his shock.

We now realise that obviously Auntie May, with whom we had many holidays, knew, all her life, that she wasn't my Dad's sister but his mother.  We also realise that her younger sister Connie must have also known about the deception, and obviously Kate knew because she and James brought up my dad as their own child.  I still struggle, years on, to think of May as my granny and Kate as my GREAT Grandmother.  I have added to May's story over the years, and even use Chat-GPT to recreate the events immediately after Harry discovered the truth.

As if all this isn't truly bizarre, just before Christmas 2016, I was contacted by a man, Duncan Leggett, living in Brisbane, not that far from Melbourne, of course, telling me that he was the grandson of Thomas William Leggett. Duncan's father is one of the sons of Thomas William Leggett and his second wife, Dorothy Eke, who he married in 1939.  Just as Carol had found my web site by searching for an ancestor, Duncan had done the same.  It's a lot cheaper than subscribing to internet resources!

Duncan and Carol and I have been working together since 2016 to try and dig deep into the Leggett family history. Thomas William Leggett's mother was called Jane, born Jane Adamson, and in the early 1890s at the age of 29 she married a man, Henry Thompson, aged 70, with whom she had a child, Harry, nine and a half months after the wedding.  The husband died soon after, probably a happy man.  Jane Adamson or Jane Thompson as she sometimes called herself subsequently had five or six children over the next 10 years, ending with Thomas William Leggett, in 1900.  

The father of these children was one George Daniel Leggett, and we are digging into his family history, which takes us to the fishing industry around Lowestoft.  

It couldn't get any more odd, could it...?