Page 152 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

among six addresses. This is the Soothill grouping who had definitely made a break from their northern background of Yorkshire. However, there were two households still remaining in Yorkshire – Alfred as a minister of the United Methodist Church and as headmaster of Ashville College in Harrogate and his uncle, Abraham, who was a retired stuff presser living in Halifax. At the time of the 1911 census, Alfred and Hannah’s Ashville College, had 16 boarders of whom four were schoolmasters and 12 were pupils. The schoolmasters were aged 24, 25, 26 and 33 years, while the pupils were aged between 14 and 18 years. One of the students was born in China and another came from Switzerland.
Uncle Abraham - the only one of Thomas and Ellen’s three boys who survived to 1911 - had also marginally increased the numbers by marrying Sarah Ann around about 1882, but they had had no children. It seems that Abraham had previously married Elizabeth Fulnetby (1844-1892); as Elizabeth died in 1892, I assume that they were divorced, but this needs to be confirmed; again there is no evidence of any issue here.
In fact, the numbers had really increased by the child-bearing efforts of Margaret (who was still alive in 1911) and her late husband, William (1836-1893). By 1911 the main movers of this branch of the family was definitely living in the south of England. Margaret was now living in Wallington, Surrey, in the household of her daughter, Ruth Emma (1878-1954), who had married Arthur John McArthur, a bank clerk aged 30, in 1910. Also in that household were Ruth and Arthur’s daughter, Margaret Annie (aged 3 months) and Dorothy Margaret Eleanor Finch (aged 15) who is Ruth Emma’s niece. However, Ruth’s brothers, Walter (1866-1951) and Herbert Ashworth (1882-1965) who will continue the Soothill line are heading their own households, also in Wallington, while their nephew, Victor Farrar, is a medical student boarding in the household of Charles and Diana Martin in Bermondsey, London. The Martins had four other medical students and one medical practitioner as boarders.
Victor whose birthplace is shown as ‘China resident’ provides a clue as to a missing 148