Annie said her father, James Walton, was “a handsome man, well over six feet, weighed 250 pounds and was not considered a fat man. He had a foot that really was a foot, just 12 inches long.”
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| James' father William Walton |
The portrait on the right is not James, but is his father, William whose family had a story straight out of Dicken’s
“Bleak House” of a court case in chancery that depleted the family fortune.
There was apparently a fight over the Walton title and estate between twin sons
who each claimed to have been born first. One burned the important documents,
and the case dragged on in court through years of technicalities, procrastinations
and evasions. If Annie had been born a son, she said, she could have reopened
and fought the case, as her younger brother Tom actually might have. He,
however, according to her “decided not to pursue the matter further.” They were
told that the family once had rich farm lands which had been sold to fight the
suit, and that later coal had been discovered under the farm. “Had they not
sold they would have become wealthy.”
In his portrait photo on the right William proudly wears his medal awarded for service in the Peninsular War against Napoleon 1807-1814.
Annie said her mother, Sarah Favel Atkin, was a tiny woman “with big brown eyes”.
Sarah's Atkin family also was remembered through stories of fate and lost prestige.
Prominence was insecure, wealth and status just out of reach.
From Granwilla: "Sarah Atkin was the daughter of a gentleman farmer. Her mother was the daughter of a large silversmith. The Atkins were of an old Lincolnshire family of unbroken descent from the time of Wycliffe.[i] In old registers her grandfather was mentioned as a “thane”.[ii] Sarah was given two dozen of each for her wedding silver. (I have some of it.) Her father’s brother, Samuel, was a big builder. He built or restored thirty churches and chapels. Her sister, Lydia, became Mrs. Bachelor.
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| Sarah's father, George Atkin, a man with a ladder |
One Sunday, when the children were little, the Atkin family went, as usual, to church. They found the door of the pew they had always occupied locked. Without a word her father turned and walked out of the church, the family following. He went home and returned with a ladder. He set it up and one by one they climbed up and down into the pew in the presence of all. A man, who said he would contribute very generously to the church had wanted that pew. It was the Atkins’ pew from that day on.”
Sarah was born in Holbeach. An early vivid memory she had was of a great storm which washed away the cliffs. Many homes and lives were lost. She remembered walking on the beach after the storm subsided and seeing the bodies of several of her playmates laid out side by side. Not long after the great storm of 1825 the family moved slightly inland to Spaulding where her brother William and sister Lydia (our Australia cousins' ancestor) were born. ([iii]
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| Spauling and Holbeche in the Fens, Lincolnshire, England |
Stories from Tom Hackett, Lydia #2's son, about his Walton grandparents:
When Tom Hackett was young his family lived with his grandparents, James and Sarah Walton and their youngest son Jimmy#6 (ancestor of cousins Tony and Maurice Walton). Tom was 7 when his grandfather was killed in a railway accident and 18 when his grandmother Sarah died. Having never met them Granwilla asked what her grandparents were like:
“Winnie Miles of Chipping Norton, England, is the daughter of Sarah Walton’s grandson, Tom. I wrote to her and asked her to send me some of her father’s recollections of his an my grandmother. She replied that, as a boy he was somewhat in awe of his grandmother, and remembers her as rather an overbearing woman who enjoyed a drop of whisky, which she probably thought would relieve her asthma. He called to mind asked his father to get him some fireworks with a precious shilling he had saved up for Guy Fawkes night and, when he handed them over to the small boy, his grandmother briskly said, ‘Now take them out and let them off, and they’ll be finished with.’
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| Sarah (Atkin) Walton. widow |
The only photo your author has of Sarah is late in
life, a tiny woman with big brown eyes. The last years of her life she was
an invalid with a collapsed lung, and remained in her bedroom.[i].
[i] All quotes in this blog post are from
Granwilla’s memoirs written 1968 when she was 81. Granwilla lived to 99 and could translate Latin right up to the end.
[i]
Wycliffe died in 1384. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe
[ii]
Thane: an Anglo-Saxon term in England for a man who had land granted by the
king. A thane was a nobleman ranking between a freeman and a hereditary
nobleman.
[iii]
This could have been the violent storm of Feb 1825. Her family moved to
Spaulding not long after. Map from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fens
weather https://www.pascalbonenfant.com/18c/geography/weather.html
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