Pass the Secret - Part I

When we were kids, every birthday party included at least a round or two of Pass the Secret.  The birthday girl’s mother would whisper something into her daughter’s ear and the whispers would circle the dining room table before the last person to hear them announced the phrase they had become.  Naturally we’d all embellish just a little when it was our turn, just to make the outcome that bit more interesting.

Family history can be a lot like that.  So many stories are passed along and it can be complicated, if not impossible, to draw out the strands of truth.  One of my biggest challenges turned out not to be the result of embellishments by later generations, but a deliberate attempt by my great-great-grandparents to hide. 

And what better way to remember them than by exposing their secrets on the internet?  OK, that perhaps sounds a bit disrespectful, but this is a success story I’m really proud of.

My mother never knew her maternal grandmother, Louie Schmidt, who died a few weeks before my mother was born.  My grandmother, Joan Clark, Louie’s daughter, never knew her maternal grandmother, Maria Reineke, who died a few months before my grandmother was born.  Right from the start everything began with stories.

Louie had been estranged from her siblings for reasons my grandmother did not know, but she understood that it had something to do with Maria’s death, and a box of gold sovereigns which Louie’s siblings had distributed amongst themselves when Louie, in the early stages of a late-in-life pregnancy, had been too ill to visit her dying mother.  My grandmother knew only the names of her mother’s family, but never met any of them: Mary, Jane, Jack and Louie, the four children of Jan or Johannes Schmidt, a carpenter, and his wife Mary or Maria, who lived on George Street, Romford, Essex.  Johannes and Maria were originally from Amsterdam and Maria’s family had something to do with shipping.  All were members of the Salvation Army.  Maria’s maiden name was “Reineker or something that sounds like that” – no one knew how to spell it.  In a family of Whites, Smiths, Clarks and Browns, I wanted to know more about the family with the unusual surname!

My grandmother and grandfather went to Canada after the Second World War, and contact with family back in England and Wales was sporadic: no long-distance calls or annual visits in those days.  If there were more to know, she was not close enough to learn it.  One of her sisters, in response to a letter from my mother, said that she knew that one of the sisters was a Mrs Greenhaulgh and the other Mrs Benfield, and that one had sons named Cecil and Victor, but did not know anything further.

In one of my first genealogy-related searches I found the Schmidts on George Street, Romford in 1881: John, aged 38, a carpenter, wife Maria, aged 36, daughters Maria (8) and Jane (6), both born in London, and son John (3), born in London.  (Louie wasn’t born until 1883: of this my grandmother was certain.)

Likely John "Jack" Smith (formerly Schmidt) and wife Emily (née Salisbury) in the 1930s or 1940s.

“London” was hardly specific, and with a surname like Schmidt, I had little hope of finding birth certificates for Maria/Mary, Jane and John/Jack without more information.  The family were still on George Street in 1891, although the two elder girls had left home.  John’s birthplace was now given as Bethnal Green, which helped narrow down the search, and “Louisa” was there, aged 8.  By 1901 only Louie remained at home with her parents, and her father was enumerated as “Yohanna Schmidt, aged 58, carpenter born Amsterdam ‘Nedorland’” – the enumerator had captured their accents, and this was, to me, the closest I would ever get to hearing them speak.

Over the years I managed to piece together some more information about the family.  Mary and Jane both had the same middle name – Harriet.  Mary married Joseph Greenhow in 1902 and Jane married Richard John Benfield in 1904, both at the Congregational Church on South Street, Romford.  Jane’s two sons were Victor and Cecil and I found their descendants.  John/Jack had married Emily Salisbury in 1898 and they had a son named Herbert and twins Arthur and Edith.  Last of all, Louie married William Clark in 1914 and had five daughters.  All the members of this generation used the surname Smith rather than Schmidt.

Mary Schmidt in her wedding dress, 1902 -- photo taken in Rotterdam, but she married Joseph Greenhow in Romford

My grandmother thought that Jan or Johannes Schmidt had died in 1904 but there was no record of this in Romford.  His widow remained at George Street, Romford until her death in 1923.  I had her death certificate, witnessed by her son, John Smith of New Shildon, County Durham, and her will.  Her will told me nothing about the family falling-out – its single sentence declared that she had given her daughter Mary a box which should not be opened until after she had died, and opened only by Mary.  I put what I knew about the family on my website and wondered about the contents of the box.

I hired someone to look for records in the Netherlands.  She found a Maria Reineke, born 8 August 1844 in Amsterdam to Johannes Josephus Reineke, a ship’s captain, and Maria Johanna Schmidt.  Although the facts all matched, this Maria very clearly married Jan Bootes on her 23^rd birthday, as the marriage licence for this couple spelt out all her family details and her birth certificate had been produced and transcribed into the record.  He was a carpenter and a soldier.  Johannes Schmidt had also been a carpenter: if this was the right Maria, did she have a thing for carpenters?

Maria Reineke in the 1860s.

Months passed and I worked on other branches which were more forthcoming with their stories.  Then one day someone contacted me through my website – Rosemary, Mary’s granddaughter.  We brought the Clark and Greenhow branches together and shared stories of our research: the tale of gold sovereigns was new to her.  She, too, had hired a researcher in the Netherlands, and also had the records of Maria Reineke marrying Jan Bootes.  We looked for Bootes’ death and Maria’s re-marriage, but came up empty-handed.  The couple had had one daughter, Henrietta Maria, within a year of their marriage, but the only other detail about them related to a semi-official census of Amsterdam which noted that they had been absent from the city for more than a year by 1870.  The Schmidts were living in London from the 1870s at some point, but there was no evidence of Jan’s death and Maria’s re-marriage in England.  Perhaps she’d run off with another man, maybe even a colleague of her husband’s, as both Jan and Johannes were carpenters?  If so, what happened to her husband and daughter?  We felt strongly that we were on the right track but didn’t know what to do next.

We had so little to go on: Rosemary didn’t know when or where Mary was born, other than an approximation from her age on censuses and her marriage and death certificates.  She, like I, had spent a lot of money ordering certificates for Smiths and Schmidts of Bethnal Green and of Romford who turned out to be the wrong people.  I went over and over the stories from my grandmother, hoping to find a clue, and made contact with Jane’s Benfield descendants, but they, too, didn’t know anything else about the family before they arrived in England.

My grandmother is gone now; so, too, are all her sisters but one.  I went to visit my great-aunt and she said that she felt it was now time to tell the story.

Read Part II