Introduction
Sarah Jermy was clearly the linking figure between her Norwich family of Jermys and the later Spurgeons - with their convictions about some lost estate. But just how did she relate to them ? Seemingly, the connection proceeded, as mentioned earlier, through one of her several children. They would have married towards the end of the 1790s. One of her daughters may have married a Spurgeon about then, but the only Spurgeon leading to our James (bn 1832) then relevant would be his grandfather - known to have married Eunice Grice as a single man in 1796 and remain many years with her (until both died in 1849). Otherwise, either a daughter or a son of Sarah may have married about then and have a daughter who, in turn, married our James’s father - in 1823; this would have to be the girl born Mary Castle, whom we knew was born in Ireland about 1799. This was the right period but rather a long way away.
So, what did we find when we searched for evidence regarding the eventual marriages of any of James and Sarah Blogg’s children ? Checking first the Mormon index for Blogg marriages, one was very soon aware of the marriage between a Sarah Blogg and a John Castle on Nov. 12th 1797 at the parish church in St. James, Norwich. This was the perfect time for the union of Mary Castle’s parents and the fact that the bride (seemingly Mary’s mother to be) was a Blogg left us with little doubt. It would seen to have to be the Sarah Blogg born to James and Sarah (nee Jermy) and baptised in St. John on June 14th 1772. All we had to do now was account for the birth to this couple - John and Sarah Castle - of a daughter Mary in far-off Dublin, two years hence!
A New Aspect: Oxfordshire
A beginning to the forging of this penultimate link in our Spurgeon - Jermy saga was made when we examined the actual register book for St. James. Besides verifying the marriage entry for Sarah Blogg and John Castle, one became aware of a number of Irish names of the men marrying in that church. It was later noted in the Census for that area that the Army barracks were located nearby (see map) and that there were married quarters associated with them in which some soldiers wives were listed. One soon wondered if John Castle may have been an Irish soldier stationed c1797 at Norwich when he met and married Sarah Blogg - before taking her back to Ireland where she gave birth to Mary?
An attempt was soon made to discover if any Irish regiments ware stationed in Norwich at that time. For this, the appropriate record office turned out to be the Public Record Office at Kew. Here we discovered that at that time, with Napoleon quite active in Europe, many regiments were in constant movement throughout the country and Norwich had its large share - both of regular Army regiments and various County Militias, including Norfolk’s own Militia. These were all stationed in a series of major towns throughout southern Britain but especially along the south and east coasts. Yarmouth, Ipswich and Colchester were frequent postings as were such as Dover, Hastings or the Isle of Wight. A given regiment might remain in one town for as little as 3 weeks or as long as 6 months.
In 1797, there were several different regiments in Norwich for varying periods, including some from Ireland (then an integral part of the kingdom) and others that included some Irish-born soldiers. But none of these, when their ‘muster rolls’ were scrutinised, revealed the inclusion of a John Castle. This applied also to the Norfolk Militia. But one other of the Militia regiments stationed along the east coast and in Norwich around 1796-97 was that from Oxfordshire. And this one did include in its ranks of private soldiers one John Castle! And, importantly, he was in Norwich with them in November, 1797. Next, we hoped to discover that he, with his regiment, were ordered to Ireland before 1799. Tracing this regiment’s Muster Orders, we found that early in 1798 they were moved first to Ipswich, then to Colchester and finally to Portsmouth from where, in April 1799, they did indeed - sail for Ireland! (It is possible they may have already had a son John by then, possibly born in Colchester.)
In Ireland, they were stationed at Newry and Dundalk until July 1799, when they moved to Dublin. They remained there until the end of December when they sailed back to Liverpool. However, John Castle was listed as one of 3 or 4 who remained in Dublin due to being ill. One would imagine that his wife was with him or was lodging nearby - where she gave birth to their daughter Mary Castle in about November 1799. By March 1800, the main unit of men had reached Birmingham and were soon ordered back to their home base in Oxfordshire. John Castle and a few others returned to home from Dublin, independently, also via Liverpool and Birmingham, in mi-March. Presumably, Sarah and infant Mary (and a son John possibly) followed him directly, but the movement of any family following these soldiers (which was the typical situation for the Militia) was unfortunately never recorded.
John Castle was discharged from the Militia in April 1800 when his particular platoon was disbanded. But when the Captain of same was placed in charge of a new platoon 2 years later, one of the men re-joining him in Oxfordshire was John Castle. Now Castle was a more common name there than in Norfolk and we can not be sure that this was the same John Castle. If it was, he was gradually moved about the country, including back to Colchester and Ipswich, before leaving for the Penisular Wars in 1808-9 where he was wounded and after time in hospital, returned to Dover. His wife and daughter (and any other children they may have had) may have remained with his family back in Oxfordshire or they may have followed him to East Anglia and then re-joined her Blogg or Jermy relatives. In any case, young Mary at least must have arrived in Norfolk by about 1819 when she seems to have given birth out of wedlock to a son David Castle. In later Censuses, David gives his place of birth as Norwich that year and we now know that there were no other Castles (such as a brother of Mary, as suggested earlier) that could account for David in Norfolk then.
It would seem that Mary lived in that part of Norwich near to Sprowston, at least around 1822-23, where she met and married James Spurgeon (2) and later, in 1832, gave birth in nearby Thorpe to the James Spurgeon (3) who eventually came to London conveying with him stories - possibly learned from his mother or grandmother - about his great-grandmother Sarah Jermy and her relatives in St. John de Sepulchre, including her younger half-brother Jonathan, who had claimed the Jermy estates in 1818.
An interesting post-script to this Oxfordshire part of our story concerns some barely legible writing the author discovered in the handwritten pedigrees lodged before the war with the Society of Genealogists in London by a very respected Norfolk genealogist - one Arthur Campling. This man was actually employed with the College of Arms and thus had access to a vast store of genealogical material. He specialised in working out the complicated pedigrees of all the major land-owning families of Norfolk, with an extensive cross- referencing system. He did most of this work before 1925 but seems to have added some later material around 1939, not long before he died. This concerned members of his own family - the Camplings and the Revells - who had lived in or near Loddon and Chedgrave. Because one of the Spurgeons (Bethia’s sister Christianna) had married a Revell, Campling followed up what he could find at the time (from an elderly Spurgeon still living in Chedgrave) on both families. This included a little on the various James Spurgeons and their wives. Mary Castle was shown with a brief, hardly legible note beneath saying “from Rothrfld, Co. Oxen.” (as near as could be deciphered). Also, beside her son’s name (James Spurgeon) was written, even less discernibly….“Claimant”!
I later discovered that there was a parish in south-east Oxfordshire called Rotherfield Greys where, in the Census for 1851, lived a retired soldier called Thomas Castle, then aged 72. He had a married daughter nearby who was born in Ireland in 1815. Might this man have been a brother of John Castle ? Would Mary have lived there with him and his family before coming to her relatives in Norwich ? There was also a younger John Castle living in Rotherfield Greys in 1851, born in 1803 in Wallingford, Oxen. A few weeks after our John Castle was discharged in Oxfordshire in 1800, a John Castle, widower of Wallingford, married…one Mary Jermy in nearby Benson!? She was of the only known family of Jermys in Oxfordshire, an earlier one of whom (with a cousin) had also made a claim on the Jermy estate at Stanfield Hall - claiming descent from the Gunton John Jermys of Yarmouth.
Was it ‘our’ John Castle who married in Benson - i.e. after Sarah had possibly died in childbirth in Dublin ? Was Mary Jermy some kind of distant cousin of Sarah’s ? Had the two families kept in contact so that when John Castle returned to the Wallingford area - a widower - be found some support from Sarah’s Oxfordsbire relatives, with Mary Jermy willing to take over the role of step-mother for young Mary Castle and later living in Rotherfield Greys ? Did John meet Sarah in Norwich only because she was a Jermy (by her mother) and had been asked by those in Oxfordshire to look up their ‘cousins’ ?
Whatever the answers, our odyssey seems destined to go on and on. Whether or not Sarah Jermy (bn 1743) derived from the Gunton line (as those in Oxfordshire may have done), we were, at this point, uncertain. In the meantime, at least we had managed to discover just how the Spurgeons were related to this seeming branch of the Jermy family - that is, to those of St. John de Sepulchre, Norwich. As this transpired through three generations of the female line, it seems quite remarkable that later generations retained even a vestige of the idea of a link with so early a family as the land-owning Jermys- i.e. via a sequence of Nash-Spurgeon-Castle-Blogg-Jermy intermediaries! That we were able to tease out the route of this long-suspected connection seems, in retrospect, even more remarkable.
Since writing the above, an further interesting factor has emerged although what if any implications it may have are not yet apparent. It began when searches were being made for details concerning the date and place of death of David Castle - James Spurgeon’s apparent half-brother. Over a considerable span of years there were, amazingly, only two Castle deaths registered for the name David - and both were in the same quarter of 1889. Moreover, the ages at death were very similar - at 67 and 69 - indicating births in or very near to 1820, the year of birth for ‘our’ David Castle, if allowance is made for the usual approximate nature of ages given at death by informants. These two deaths were registered at Hull and Uxbridge. Because David’s wife was a Sarah born 2 years before him, the discovery of the death of a Sarah Castle, also in Hull, in 1896 aged 78, strongly supported the choice of Hull as David’s residence in these later years of his life. Confirmation must await discovery of his and Sarah’s 1881 Census details in which their places of birth should be recorded.* It may also be noteworthy that the ‘Antingham Pedigree’ had long been housed in an old cardboard ‘tube’ which had a Hull firm’s name on it and appeared to be of vintage c 1920s. It is possible that the Pedigree was sent to James Spurgeon or his daughter Bethia by David or his son John David Castle around that time. *[This was later confirmed; they lived at Newington, near Hull.]
However, in the meantime, the additional factor referred to above began to emerge with a discovery of another Castle death which was registered in 1894 (only happened upon as one was proceeding backwards from the year 1900 when seeking the death registration for David Castle). This was in the intriguing name of “James Spurgeon Castle”!? This turned out to be a 3 year old boy, the son of a William James Castle and wife Anne Martha Castle, registered in Kensington, London, as was his birth in 1891. Subsequent searching soon established that this couple had married in 1882, with the marriage registered in…Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.
The reference to Oxfordshire, and especially to that south-east part of the county, immediately excited one’s imagination: Was this William Castle of the same root as John, Mary and David Castle:? And did the choice of name given to his son imply that James Spurgeon was still in contact with the Oxfordshire roots of his mother and half-brother? What would William and Anne’s marriage certificate reveal regarding his origins; in particular, his father’s name and the specific parish in which they married ? Might it be Rotherfield Greys, which was just 2 miles from Henley and certainly within the registration district centred on same ?
The certificate showed that they in fact had married in Hambledon, a small village on the other side of Henley but certainly still in the same general area (see map). William’s father was given as ‘John Castle’, deceased. This proved confusing as one had felt he may have been a later son of David Castle - born around 1855-‘60, say. And David’s son John was not born until 1849 (apparently, but this needs confirmation) and so would not seem to be William’s father either. Might David’s apparent mother Mary have had a brother born ca 1798 (whether named John or not) - as one suggested earlier to have been born in Colchester - who would be likely to name any son he may have had - around 1830, say - as John Castle - after their father ?
Whatever the answer, we still had to account for the name ‘James Spurgeon Castle’ given by William and Anne to their son in 1891. One quite possible answer to this occurred when I vaguely recalled that in an 1881 Census for Pennington Street in Wapping, James Spurgeon’s 2nd (or 3rd?) wife Hannah was included in his household. We didn’t know when or where they had married or what her maiden name had been (or former married name, if a widow). My memory was that her place of birth was neither London nor Norfolk, but somewhere like Bedfordsbire, or was it Buckingham ? I sought out this long since filed way item and was happily surprised to see that Hannah was born in Hambledon, Bucks - in 1847!
Might this imply that she was Anne Higgins’ elder sister - who invited Anne down to visit herself and James around 1880, say, and thereby was introduced to William Castle ? Or, even if she met William quite independently, she may have quite liked her sister’s new husband and some years later chose to name her son after him ? This could imply that the name ‘Castle’ was simply a coincidence and that William’s origins were not necessarily near Henley. If on the other hand they were, this could suggest that Uxbridge (on the other side of Bucks.), rather than Hull, may have been where David last lived. William’s birth certificate might suggest an answer, if David’s Census entry is not found.
William’s certificate was later obtained and showed that he was born in Kensington to John Castle and his wife Jane Hathaway in 1857. This couple married in St. Martins-in-the- Fields in 1842. He was then aged 23 and his full name John Lane Castle, as was that for his father. In a Census entry for 1851, he gave his place of birth as Milton, Oxfordshire. This would be about the year 1819 and his father would thus be born, possibly in the same area, around 1798, say. Unfortunately, neither of these John Castles’ baptisms have been located in any of the three Miltons in that county.
Just what significance yet another line of Oxfordshire John Castles (who tie in with our Spurgeons) may have for our final analysis, cannot be answered as yet. It was later confirmed that Hannah was indeed a Higgins and Anne’s sister. There was a 3rd sister named Frances and it appears that James Spurgeon married both Frances and Hannah in turn; the first being Frances (as ‘Fanny’) in 1871 at St George Hanover Square, London. She apparently died in the mid-1870s as, by 1881, his wife at Pennington St. was Hannah.
James had lost his first wife, Maria, in 1860 (her death was registered in Gt. Yarmouth that year; she was probably in a sanatorium there.). His elder daughter Christianna also married (for the 1st time) at St George Hanover Squae - in 1873 - so the family would seem to have settled in that area after first arriving from Norfolk - say around 1865 or so - before settling in Wapping when James became a Dock Constable. Did he just happen to meet a girl there then (Frances Higgins) who came from the same area as his mother near Henley or, as seems more likely, did the families know each other already? And did William James Castle who later married another of the Higgins girls just happen to derive from an Oxfordshire family also? What significance to all this was the marriage in 1800 between a John Castle, widower of Wallingford, to Mary Jermy in Benson, Oxfordshire? And did ‘our’ John Castle and wife Sarah have as a 1st child a son John Castle in 1798 - before they went to Ireland (where Mary was born in late 1799)? If so, would they have given him the middle name of ‘Lane’ (being, for example, the maiden name of the elder John’s mother)? As mentioned, his birth might be more expected in such as Ipswich or Colchester (where John was stationed in 1798) than in Oxfordshire. These questions are for future research the results of which, if any, may one day be added in this section. In the meantime, we may return to the matter of a possible link between Sarah and Jonathan Jermy of Norwich and the landed Jermy family. This is pursued in Part Four.
Part Four - On the Origin of the Relevant Jermys: Four Theories