d.06/12/1863
Baker with a tragic domestic life
Relatives
Research:
William Halsey died 6th December 1863 aged 70.
Sarah Catherine, his wife, died 14th September 1881 aged 68
Mr William Halsey’s gravestone mentions two of his children, Ann Gomm and William junior. There were a multiple William Halseys living in the Berkhamsted/Northchurch area during the 1800’s, so which one was William junior? William junior appears to have been a Baker living in the High Street, who married one Jean Williams, by licence, at St Peter’s on 17th August 1830.
The 1841 census shows that like his father, the younger William had a penchant for ladies considerably younger than himself, with Jean being 15 years his junior.
William and Jean had five children, all baptised at St Peter’s. The great thing about the incumbent at St Peter’s during the 1830’s and 40’s was that each child’s position in the family, ie 1st son, 2nd daughter was stated, as well as each child’s date of birth. William and Jean’s children were:-
- William, born 10th May and baptised 17th July 1831.
- Harry, born 31st January and baptised29th December 1833.
- Isabella Jean, born 19th October and baptised 7th December 1834.
- Charlotte Ellen, born 10th May and baptised 15th July 1838.
- Frances, born 24th August 1840 and baptised 21st February 1841.
From this point onwards the story of the family is a series of tragic events with no happy ending. William and Jean’s youngest daughter didn’t even survive to be enumerated in the 1841 census shown below. Little Frances was buried on 21st March 1841. She was followed four months later by her brother Harry, who was buried on 1st July 1841.
The following year proved to be not much better as Jean herself was buried on 17th April 1842 at St Peter’s, aged a mere 34 years old. William was now left with three motherless children and the running of his baker’s business. This situation was to last only a few weeks before the death of William’s eldest daughter Isabella Jean, who was buried on 16th June 1842 aged 8.
William was now left with just two children, William and Charlotte Ellen, both of whom were buried with their grandfather before the decade’s end. This meant that by July 1849 William had lost his wife and all five of their children. We cannot know for sure what caused such decimation of the Halsey family, but in the 1830s a “new fever,” typhus, was discovered. During its worst outbreak, in 1837-38, most of the deaths from fever in London were attributed to typhus, and new cases averaged about sixteen thousand in England in each of the next four years. This happened to coincide with one of the worst smallpox contagions, which killed tens of thousands, mainly infants and children. Additionally, Scarlet fever, or scarlatina as it was then called, was responsible for nearly twenty thousand deaths in 1840 alone.
Meanwhile William’s younger sister (Elizabeth) Ann had married Joseph Gomm of Chesham at Chesham Bois on 17th July 1817. In spite of the fact that Joseph was from Chesham, the family immediately settled in Berkhamsted and had all but one of their children baptised at St Peter’s as follows:-
- Sarah Ann Gomm born circa 1818 in Berkhamsted
- Ann baptised 1st January 1822. As seen from her grandfather’s tombstone, Ann died on 29th September 1843. She was buried on 5th October 1843. She would have been amongst the first burials in Rectory Lane Cemetery, which was only established the previous year, and she was the first to be buried in plot 196.
- Emma Elizabeth baptised 12th October 1823
- Harry baptised 30th October 1825 and buried 16th September 1827
- William baptised 25th December 1827.He married Clarissa Smith in 1851 and became a banking clerk living in Hackney. They had two sons, Walter and Lewis. He died in 1889.
- Emily baptised 8th November 1829
- Fanny baptised 6th November 1831
- Lucy baptised 12 March 1834 and buried on 19th December 1836
- Henry Jesse born 6th December 1836 and baptised 29th February 1836. He married Sophia Attride in 1862, had two children and became a licenced victualler and stone carver, ending his days in Frimley, Surrey in 1911.
- Ellen baptised 10th March 1839
Joseph was a builder and the family lived in the High Street. The trade directory extract showing William Halsey in red, actually also lists his brother-in-law, Joseph Gomm as a carpenter, also of the High Street. Despite the deaths of two very young children and her adult daughter Ann, Ann Gomm nee Halsey was a lot more successful in raising a family than her brother, William. In 1861 she and Joseph had two grandchildren living with them, Fanny and William Rogers, from Knightsbridge.Ann’s daughter Fanny married Alfred Joseph Rogers, a widower from Knightsbridge on 27th May 1850, when she was just 18. Alfred appears to have been a very successful man. In 1836 he was received into The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and he had his own practice in London. As can be seen from the 1861 census, Fanny was living in Knightsbridge, with her husband, a step-daughter, her spinster sister Sarah and a servant.
Ann would have lived to see at least nine grand-children before she died in Berkhamsted in 1868.
Returning to William, in spite of what must have been devastating grief at the loss of his first family, William was prepared to try again. In 1850, in the City of London, William married Sarah Catherine Cope Norris. Sarah has already appeared in the biographies of Rectory Lane Cemetery as the sister of Samuel Cope Underwood. At the time of her marriage to William, the 38 year-old Sarah had been a childless widow for 10 years, and was fairly comfortably well-off, having inherited £100 from the will of her Uncle George Cope Underwood in 1847.
In 1851 William and Sarah were living in the High Street, probably in the premises of William’s Baker’s shop. In 1861 William was still a baker in the High Street, employing one man. He and Sarah appear to have never had any children, so that when he died on 6th December 1863, his executors were his wife Sarah Catherine Cope Halsey and a fellow tradesman in the town, Thomas Heath. As William had fathered children previously and Sarah had had no children from her first marriage to Daniel Norris, it seems probable that she was unable to have children.
Although the initial source of this biography was the gravestone of Sarah’s father-in-law William Halsey senior (Plot 192), William junior and Sarah shared their own gravestone (Plot 152). Looked at on face value, one might be led to believe that Sarah survived another 18 years comfortably off, as William’s widow. The 1871 census shows that she took on the running of the bakery in the High Street, and was able to afford a servant. But things changed in November 1872 when she married Henry James Wood, gentleman who was 6 years her senior.
Just the year before their marriage Henry had been a “Lodging House Keeper” in Hampstead, even though he was born and raised in Berkhamsted.
The marriage lasted less than seven years as Henry died on 11th August 1879. The probate for Henry’s will, and Sarah’s own will, made the year after Henry died, does make one wonder if there was some sort of disharmony in their marriage. Henry’s nephews were his executors, rather than his wife, and Sarah’s will made no mention of her third husband’s family at all. This could be why she was buried with her second husband William Halsey.
Sarah left “my two houses at Canal Side Great Berkhamsted … facing Mr Hattons Wharf” to the six children of “my late sister-in-law Mrs Ann Gomme or to such of them as shall be living at my decease as tenants in common”. Everything else she left to her three nieces, Kate Underwood, Martha Underwood and Elizabeth the wife of Robert Piltz, provided that they paid her brother Samuel Underwood “an annuity or yearly sum of fifty-two pounds during his life by weekly payments of one pound”. This would be about £122 today.
With the death of Sarah Catherine Cope Wood, formerly Halsey, formerly Norris, the association of the family of William Halsey (1756-1850) with Berkhamsted comes to an end.
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