We might live in an age where a missing letter means not receiving an email, but our ancestors did not! The Walnes, like so many other families, take us on a merry dance through the records, transcribed deliberately or otherwise in several different ways.
This Christmas [December 2024!], I was inundated with emails. One came from a lady called Gill, researching a Mary Walne. It was an email that brought with it a revelation – there are Walnes, and Walne headstones, at Stradbroke in Suffolk.
Why a revelation, you ask? Because I’ve spent forty years driving to (and through!) Stradbroke, but until Gill’s email arrived, I never knew there were any there.
A couple of months later, I broke the journey home at All Saints church and set my boys to searching for a gravestone with my name on it (yep, one is yet another Elizabeth Walne). We were lucky enough to find four headstones in a row, the one on the far right a double. Elizabeth, John, Daniel and Susan.[1]
But hang on, isn’t this post about Mary?
Yes, it is. There is a Mary Walne buried in Stradbroke somewhere, too. She doesn’t seem to have a headstone, though, and it seems likely that she was somewhat less well-off than the above Walnes, which might suggest that she never did.
At the time of her first email, Gill hadn’t been able to secure a death certificate for a Mary Walne whose death had been registered in Hoxne RD in December Quarter 1848. The picture was further complicated by two other Mary Walnes whose deaths were registered nearby in the same year. What’s more, Gill’s Mary was last seen in the 1841 census, and a fourth death index possibility showed up in Kent in September 1841. And these four are just those recorded as ‘Walne’ – start to add even just Warn, Warne and Warnes, and you add another forty-plus possibilities.
And so began a project. Who were these four Marys? Were they all connected – to me, each other, or Gill? I went on a mission to find out. 4000 words later, I’d better split it into four posts…
Mary I (‘Kent Mary’)
Taking them in the order in which they fall in the death registration index, we start with the Mary Walne whose death was registered in Eastry RD, Kent, in September Quarter 1841. Kent Mary was buried at St Mary’s, Sandwich, and was apparently 61 when she died, giving us a birth date of 1780.
The 1841 census also uses the spelling Walne. Sadly, it finds Mary in the Eastry Union Workhouse, enumerated as 60 (generally rounded down to the nearest five), and noted ‘I’ – probably denoting ‘invalid’ in this case. I suspect Mary had had no choice but to enter the workhouse for end-of-life care. Eastry Union weekly indoor relief lists seem to feature her from the quarter ending Michaelmas (29 September) 1840.[2]
With few clues to go on, I looked for other Walnes in Sandwich – and bingo, there was Thomas Walne marrying Mary Hopkins, widow, in the same church that Mary was buried, on 21 January 1824. Could this Thomas Walne be the Thomas Appleby Walne acquitted of burglary at the October Dover quarter session later that same year? It’s close-by but otherwise circumstantial for now. But if we follow the thread, then the unusual middle name leads to a matching baptism at Christ Church, Spitalfields, in 1802, which suggests Thomas was the illegitimate son of a lady named Ann who lived on Church Street. Newspaper reports suggest Thomas was a watchmaker who also spent time in Canterbury.[i] The dissolution of his business partnership came only months before he was acquitted of burglary:
Thomas Appleby Walne, lately a silversmith in Canterbury, was indicted for stealing from the shop of William Garner, of Margate, on the 2d of Sept. three pearl broaches, six silver snuff boxes, and sundry other articles of jewellery. Owing to the absence of Mr. Garner, the prosecutor, who was the principal witness, the Recorder gave it as his opinion, that the robbery could not be brought home to the prisoner; he regretted that the prisoner should be turned loose upon society again. Had the prosecutor appeared, there could be no doubt the prisoner would have been found guilty.
Essex & Herts Mercury, 2 November 1824
What happened to Mary’s much-younger husband is a mystery to solve another day. His business partner, George Philcox, appears as an insolvent debtor in the London Gazette in February 1825, but Thomas’ next steps aren’t obvious.
So, Mary wasn’t born a Walne, she became one in 1824 – for better or worse. The spelling was consistent in her records and in her husband’s – from his baptism to his business ‘Philcox and Walne’. She’s earned her place in my One Name Study, but so far, there is no obvious link to either my family or Gill’s. For that, the trail needs to follow back through her potential mother-in-law.
Ann, daughter of James Walne, taylor (sic), and Ann of Bird Street, was baptised on 19 October 1783, five years after her parents married at St Katherine by the Tower, in Tower Hamlets. Her father James was the son of another James Walne, taylor, of Mile End Old Town (often noted as MEOT in registers), born 5 March 1758 and baptised at Saint Dunstan, Stepney, six weeks later.
Walne wasn’t a common name in London, at least not transcribed as such, and James and Mary’s sons account for the majority of the baptisms in the capital in the 1760s. But where did James come from? I have a theory. There is a marriage for a James Waln (sic) and Mary Rudman in Alderton[3], Wiltshire, on 12 December 1748. A daughter, ‘Pruadentia’, was baptised in Wiltshire in October the next year. But after that, the family vanishes from the local registers. Another Walne couple, William and Susanna (also nee Rudman!), had a daughter Mary baptised in March 1750 in the same parish, but they stuck around.
So far, this is coincidental. But a record for a Prudencia Waln of Mile End Old Town appears at St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, in July 1764 – sadly, a burial. The very same church where James and Mary had five sons baptised between 1756 and 1763. Unusual first names can sometimes be a boon to the researcher.
As such, the hunt now moves to Wiltshire. But it’s a cold search at the moment. Records start to dwindle – certainly digitised ones – and there is little to go on without extensive study. A potential lead is a marriage for John Waln (sic) and Mary Pepple in Hannington, but no baptisms have been found yet to link them together. For now, it remains but a wishful thought that they could potentially link back to the James and John Walnes of Norfolk or Goosnargh, Lancashire.
Mary (Kent) Walne, then, seems to belong to my One Place Study, but is (for now) connected to neither of the main branches of Walne families. Instead, perhaps her Walnes originated from a different name variation in the late 1690s…
[2] Transcribed on FMP in Kent Poor Law Union 1835-1841
[3] The register on Ancestry is a later copy. While the copy states Mary’s baptism is in Alderton and clearly says Rudman, other transcriptions – possibly from another source – say Mary Redman, in Aldbourne. Further transcriptions say James Wallen at marriage, but again, this may come from a different source.
