Beard family

I received an email from one of my Beard cousins in England yesterday sending me information on the Hemsley family there. Henry Beard married Elizabeth Hemsley 31 Mar 1766. Initially this marriage was missing from the London records when Ancestry published them on their website. I wrote to them and mentioned the missing two pages and a few months later they appeared although attached to 1776 marriage pages (at the beginning). Henry Beard is transcribed as Henry Picard and I have sent in a correction which is published on the transcription page.

This is the same cousin that mentioned that Henry Beard's will was available at "Documents on Line" a section of the National Archives webpage. I immediately downloaded it along with the will of his second wife Jane Beard and a will of a Richard Beard probated in 1823 also at St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey. He was finding the transcription of these wills difficult and so I sent him off my transcriptions. I rather enjoy transcribing wills and my ability to do so is steadily improving.

He is working his way back to Edward Beard bc 1764 and he lives on Grange Road as did my Beard family. I suspect he is a younger brother of Henry Beard along with Richard Beard. I am still hunting out the parents of Henry Beard. From his death age on the burial page he would appear to have been born in 1741. There is a marriage of a Robert Beard and Ann Ament in 1737 at St Mary Magdalen. Robert is a widower and Ann a spinster so would have likely been young enough to have a son as late as 1764. I am going to try to learn more about this couple through Ancestry.

However, I digress. Robin wrote to me about the Hemsley family. I had found the baptism of Elizabeth Hemsley at St Mary Magdalen but the year for this Elizabeth was 1744 and the burial register for Elizabeth Beard said she was 38. I felt that the priest would likely have been closer to her actual age if she had been baptized there. The 1744 birth/baptism would have made her only 37. Not a big difference but I hadn't pursued the Thomas/Elizabeth Hemsley parents of this child. He had found at St Mary, Newington (about 1 mile distance from St Mary Magdalen) there was a baptism for Elizabeth Hemsley Nov 1742 (birth 16 Oct 1742) and with a burial date of 22 Jul 1781 these dates better fit into a 38 year old at death. Parents of this Elizabeth were Matthew Hemsley and Mary Coal and they had been married 14 Dec 1740 at St Mary Newington, Southwark. They had two other living children (Mary b1741:d young), George b 1744 and Mary b 1750) all baptized at St Mary Newington. He hadn't been able to find a baptism for Matthew Hemsley although had spotted a Hemsley/Roland couple baptizing children at St Saviour Southwark in the right time frame. That will wait for a further look at the St Saviour records. John Hemsley married Mary Roland at St Mary Le Bow London. This parish is not all that far from Southwark being just the other side of the Tower Bridge towards the northwest. The occupation of this John was Cheesemonger and that of Matthew Hemsley was tanner which would fit in very well with Henry Beard who started his career as a Fellmonger and then moved on to Tanner.

Perhaps the Beard wills that I downloaded at Kew will be handy for this family and I may devote some time this week to looking at them with this new information on the Hemsley family. The Beard family is definitely brickwalled with Henry born/baptized in 1741 and parents unknown at the moment.

That took up most of yesterday which I had planned to use to work on the Andover Parish Registers. I want to get back to putting in a couple of hours a day on them.