Following in their footsteps – part 3

After our quick tour around Canterbury (and a coffee) we were again on the bus for a twenty-minute trip down to Dover. Canterbury was really busy that day with a food fair, and it seemed no-one else but Steve and I were journeying down to Dover by bus that day – we had it to ourselves. The driver, a Dovorian, was very friendly and when he learned we were only to visit Dover for a few hours took us on an un-scheduled detour past the Castle through the tiny streets in his big bus just so we could see it close up!

a glimpse of Dover Castle

Again we were met in Dover by a friendly local Denise,  one of the Dover Greeters. This is a free service and well worth it if, like us, you have limited time and want to cover as many bases as possible.  We were expecting that Denise would just give us access to the cemetery, but she took us by car and walking all around the places we wanted to see and a few more besides.

Check out the map Dover Map 2 from To live a long and Prosperous Life to see some of the places I mention in this post.

First stop was the old Hebrew cemetery, Charlton Road, on Copt Hill. While none of the Nathan family are buried here as the cemetery was not opened until the family had moved away (although Solomon Lyon Nathan’s mother in law Catherine Isaacs was the first person to be interred), the walls incorporate plaques removed from the Synagogue after it was demolished as a result of bomb damage from WWII. (see p124 To live a Long and Prosperous Life)

The plaque laid by Barnett Nathan in the new Dover Synagogue in 1865.

THIS SYNAGOGUE
BUILT BY VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS:

B. NATHAN J.GRUNWALD, D.BARNARD, H.POLACK, H.BARRAS, B.LINDON WAS CONSECRATED ON MONDAY 10th AUGUST 5625 – 1865

W. GRUNWALD A.J.VANDERLYN PRESIDENT TREASURER

( D. Barnard and AJ Vanderlyn were Barnett Nathan’s sons-in-law)

The small cemetery is sandwiched between two other cemeteries and like the Canterbury Hebrew burial ground it is also locked. The lower part seen here is treed and is quite pleasant, however the graves are all perched higher up on the rise. There was little grass there (probably sprayed) with many graves eroding and some with rabbit holes which was sad to see. Over the wall was St James cemetery, where Dinah’s cousin Rebecca Mallett, nee Abrahams is buried (see ‘An intriguing affair’ p87 TLL&P). However as I have yet to find a plot reference or if there is a headstone for Rebecca Mallett we did not have the time to search for her.

We then went up to Western Heights where we could look down onto Snargate Street, and across the channel to France. The view is now vastly different from when Dinah was a little girl, or even the first few decades of the 20th century:

Dover, from Western Heights, Snargate Street in left foreground. (image courtesy Paul Wells)

Dover from Western Heights. The seaward side of Snargate Street is now bare after demolition post-WWII. The Pent and dry dock are visible. The Synagogue built in 1866 was at the end of the Pent, now a car park.

Dover Castle from Western Heights

Dover harbour looking towards France

The building with the big chimney is the old Harbour Railway Station, formerly in Elizabeth Street. It was in this area that the first Dover Synagogue was situated. Also near here is Limekiln Street, where little Nathaniel Nathan lived his short life with his maternal grandparents the Shepards.

On the way back down we stopped at the oldest burial ground in Dover; Cowgate Cemetery. Somewhere in here is the grave of Nathaniel Nathan’s son Nathaniel Sheppard who died as an infant. The graveyard has been allowed to revert to a wilderness and is a nature reserve. With mown pathways it is a pleasant sheltered place to wander in.

Continuing on our family history trail we drove down Castle Street, and stopped to find the retirement home of Barnett and Julia Nathan, at number 26. They lived here for a few years, long enough to appear on the 1861 census where Barnett is recorded as ‘gentleman’ and Julia ‘lady’.

26 Castle Street – Barnett and Julia lived here

I found that what I had thought was number 26 (searching in Google street view) was actually opposite the correct house. As I approached I realised there wasn’t a number on this house, but a young man was just about to enter and he confirmed it was the correct number.  So my description in the book of the Nathan house having ‘elegant pilasters’ isn’t quite accurate!

We then had a chance to get a feel of the Dover foreshore, walking along the waterfront and around the new harbour developments. Of course I couldn’t resist and I slipped down onto the beach and pocketed a small golden sandstone pebble and a piece of water-worn chalk. Next time I visit Greymouth I will leave this on Dinah’s grave – full circle again.

Then it was just a short stroll along Snargate Street. A handful of buildings remain, many vacant, on what was once the thriving business and shopping centre.

Snargate Street in early 20th century. The shop at number 20 owned by the Nathans was the one on the right with the white awning. (photo courtesy Ken Chapman)

Standing about where the Nathan shop and home at 20 Snargate Street would have been. How many my forebears had passed by here?

One building of note that remains is the Dover Masonic lodge, which Barnett Nathan was an esteemed member, it is masonic records which give us the earliest record of Barnett  in Dover. This is reputed to be one of the oldest continuously used lodge buildings.

While standing on Snargate Street I was quite relieved to hear seagulls , as I had written about Dinah hearing the gulls cry when she was a little girl.  She would scarely recognise the place now. Gone are the many shops, bustling crowds and red-coats; Dover seems to be a shadow of its former self. No longer a destination, it is a barely a stopping place for the traffic heading to the continent. The A20 runs alongside Snargate street, and there were an inordinate amount of traffic barriers as road works were underway to remove traffic roundabouts, no doubt so people can travel theough dover even more faster.

Waiting for the bus by the little park, Pencester Gardens, I did notice lots of families enjoying the sunday afternoon sunshine, with the castle on the sky-line. At the edge of the green area I discovered I could look down onto gently flowing water occuied by a couple of ducks. I had found the Dour (sometimes Dovr), the little river that over thousands of years cut down through the cliffs and created the valley in which Dover, the town of its name, sits. Now its path to the sea is culverted over and it exits somewhere into the former Pent which lay on the seaward side of Snargate Street. Snargate Street probably got its name from the barrier used on the Dour for preventing debris from washing into and fouling the harbour and anchorage area.

Pencester Gardens

The Dour

Our all too brief visit of Dover had come to an end. We boarded the bus and headed back to London, the lowering sun giving us a final glimpse of the white cliffs as we climbed up the valley and back to the motorway. We hadn’t seen the castle, or climbed the Grand Shaft, but we did achieve what some had said was impossible – a day trip to Canterbury and Dover. I was tired but so glad that I had the opportunity to see for myself the places that figured so largely in the Nathan family.

Following in their footsteps – part 2

A day trip to Canterbury-Dover

We finished our four-week trip of Europe and UK with a few days in London, arriving by train from Cheltenham on a Saturday afternoon. Very early the next morning, before the sun was up, we caught a big red double-decker bus from our lodgings in Paddington to Victoria station, and from there caught another bus to Canterbury, Kent. Travelling by bus was the only way to do this trip in a day – trains all seemed to be geared to travelling through to Europe and were very expensive. I was a bit apprehensive of catching a bus in London in the dark but each stop was announced along the way and we managed to get off in the right place! We then had a ten-minute walk to get to Victoria Station.

Waiting for a bus in the dark in Praed Road, Paddington

Victoria Station is the terminus for buses that travel out of London

A glimpse of London suburbs as the sun rose – it took best part of an hour to get out of greater London: even on a Sunday morning there was a lot of traffic

Flying southwards along the busy motorway through rolling, wooded Kent farmland down to the coast was altogether another experience: previously on our trip we had travelled by plane, train and car. The plus was that we sat high up and could see the countryside, the negative was that the tinted windows of the bus made it nearly impossible to take photographs of the scenery.

We arrived in Canterbury just after 9 am. Here we were met by a lovely local Gilley who was to let us into the locked Jewish Cemetery. First we walked up the High Street:

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The Jews Burial Ground

The cemetery is rather hard to find, located behind high brick walls and some shops on Whitstable Road. you have to go down what seems to be a private drive between the shops and a house to find the gate.

Here we visited the graves of Dinah’s parent’s grandparents and her brothers, sister and brother-in-law: Frances and her husband Mordecai Nathan (both died 1841), Barnett (d 1866) and Julia Nathan (d 1886), Solomon Nathan (d 1841) Joseph Nathan (d 1856), Benjamin Nathan (d 1848), Fanny (d 1878) and Joel Abrahams (d 1867). There are other unmarked Nathan’s here too: Dinah’s brother Solomon had at least two children buried here; Henry (1837-1838) and his un-named baby daughter. Four of the interments were brought to be buried from afar: Solomon Lyon and his son Henry both brought from France, Benjamin from Portsea and Joseph from Exeter. There may well be other family here too, as the sources I consulted (Webster, Cemetery Scribes) have only listed those associated with Dover and legible headstones. The Nathan family who had ties to Dover for nearly 100 years has now got descendants scattered across the globe.

As well as the familiar headstones, I was also able to identify that of Joseph Nathan, the brother closest to Dinah in age. Joseph had died aged just 25 a few weeks after Dinah and Nathaniel married. Joseph’s stone was made of sandstone and has badly deteriorated so the wording is all but obliterated, however I was able to make out the first name ‘Joseph’. His stone was next to his grandparents and brother Solomon on one side and his parents on the next. In fact all of the Nathan family graves that are identified occupy a single row, along with one or two other burials, towards the back of the cemetery.

Joseph Nathan 1831-1856. Hebrew on this stone followed by English is all but indecipherable. The headstone is recorded by Martyn Webster (1996). Webster refers to inscription records made in 1973 for the Jewish Historical Society in which this stone (M4) is: “NATHAN Joseph youngest son of Barnett age 24”.

‘JOSEPH . . . ‘ is just visible, here I wet the stone to try to get a bit more contrast.

I had first come across images of the Nathan family headstones (except Joseph Nathan’s) on Cemetery Scribes. In my research I also came across Tina Machindo’s site Historic Canterbury. Tina has several pages about the jewish community in Kent, including the one about the cemetery and the synagogue.  Tina kindly allowed me to use her photographs of Nathan family tombstones in To live a Long and Prosperous Life.

In correspondence with Tina I discovered that she had in her collection a letter written to a Nathan descendant: Kitty Glassman (nee Barnard) about the up-keep of the cemetery. Kitty was the grand-daughter of Dinah’s sister Kate and her husband David Barnard. It was Kitty’s parent’s B.I. and Abby Barnard who had been the last of the Nathan descendants to be in business in Dover. Tina kindly sent me a copy of this letter, the transcript can be seen on her website here.

It was incredibly moving to be in this place where so many of my forebears lie together. With finally seeing these headstones came the realisation that somehow a circle had now been completed – from when Dinah left England in 1864, as her great, great, great-granddaughter I was finally able to pay respects at the grave of her parents, which she was never able to visit herself, although she had undoubtedly stood here at the graves of her grandparents and siblings. I felt the ache of loss and grief and how difficult it must have been to be so far away from family in times of loss and felt tears well for Dinah.

At the end of my book I wrote of visiting Dinah’s grave in 2013 –

I had remembered to bring a stone—white quartz—and tucked it onto the ledge of what remained of her headstone. A sliver of white marble from the headstone lay there. I put it in my pocket. I found it there later when I absently slipped my hand inside: thin, white, crystalline and slightly dished like a shell. Limestone turns to marble under pressure.

I had kept this small fragment from Dinah’s gravestone in Greymouth, New Zealand since that visit in 2013. It sat above my computer for four years while I researched and wrote Dinah’s story. Now it had travelled with me on our journey across the world. It is the Jewish custom not to lay flowers at a grave, but instead to place a small stone in remembrance and to acknowledge your visit. I placed the fragment on Dinah’s parent’s gravestone. I also brought small white quartz pebbles for the other graves, carefully tucked away in our luggage and left them there too. A silent message: you are not forgotten.

Dinah’s gravestone fragment rests on her parents headstone.

Exploring Canterbury

After visiting the cemetery we went and found Hawks Lane, where Barnett and Julia Nathan were living at the time of Barnett’s death. Nearby is Jewry Lane, which is where (surprise) the Jewish community was situated before their expulsion from England by Edward I. Unfortunately the area where Julia was living when she died; Riding Gate (part of the city wall), has been redeveloped and lost to expanded roadway.

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We also found the building where the Abrahams had their Glass and China shop, rebuilt after the devastating fire in 1865. (p116) The stone building on the corner of Mercury Lane survived, but the ancient half-timber medieval hostel (featured in Chaucer’s Tales) in which Abrahams shop was situated was engulfed along with most of the block. The re-built part is white-fronted block to left of the corner building.

corner Mercury Lane and High Street

We also searched and found the remaining building of the Canterbury Hebrew Synagogue, now used by Kings School as a recital room.

Former Canterbury Synagogue, now part of a school

Canterbury was lovely and I really wished we could have looked at the cathedral, however as it was a Sunday there were limited entry times. The Cathedral is walled and you pay to get into the precincts, so you can’t even just wander around outside. We got small glimpses from various narrow and winding streets but it is quite different from the cathedrals and abbeys we saw in the Cotswolds which seem to have more green space around them.

Gate to Canterbury Cathedral Precinct. Being a Sunday morning, you were only allowed in if you were going to attend the service.

The High Street in Canterbury is paved as a pedestrian precinct, and was delightful to explore, although there are many shops aimed at the ever-present tourists. To the east of the High street lay the Cathedral precinct and a warren of tiny streets and lanes, yet to the west we suddenly found ourselves in a modern shopping precinct, complete with chain stores and food courts, giving a weird sense that we had just time-travelled between two or more centuries.

A view of the Cathedral tower

next: our visit to Dover

Following in their footsteps – part 1

In October 2016 my husband Steve and I spent just four short weeks in Europe and UK. I was determined to visit a few of the places my forebears had come from and that I had researched and written about. Over the next few posts I will bring you some of my experiences ‘abroad’ (as Paddington Bear might say).

Amsterdam

The first place we came to with family connections was Amsterdam. It was here about 1737 that Dinah Nathan’s grandmother Frances was born. Frances was living with her son, Dinah’s father, Barnett Nathan in Dover in 1841 when she died, at the incredible age of 104, so Dinah probably remember this little old lady.

Amsterdam in 1737 was a thriving port and as incredible as it may seem to an antipodean who lives in a country where buildings over 150 years are considered VERY old, many buildings from this era, and much earlier, survive today just as they did then, lining the canals spanned by pretty bridges.

 

Flowers on the bridge just by the Rijks Museum

While in Amsterdam we visited Rembrandt’s House in the Jewish quarter, or Jodenbuurt. Rembrandt lived there between 1639 and 1656, a hundred years before Frances was born, but it was a peculiar feeling that she might have walked past this place. Stepping inside was like walking into a painting and for me a highlight of our trip. It is entirely feasible that Frances lived in a similar house not far from here. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed inside, so make sure you check out the link to these 360º photos here.

Rembrandt’s House in the Jewish Quarter, Amsterdam (and a bicycle)

At the door of Rembrandt’s house

 Rembrandt was to paint (and etch) several pictures of his Jewish neighbours. This beautiful painting, known as The Jewish Bride we saw in the Rijks museum:

‘The Jewish Bride’ in the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam, painted around 1667

After Paris, Amsterdam was clean, pretty and safe. I felt very much ‘at home’ and that I could happily live there. The reality is that most of the people who work there commute as it is really hard to find somewhere to live, even the houseboats on the canals are very expensive. I hope one day to return and spend a bit more time exploring this old and vibrant city, as our stay there was for just a few days and I was still finding ‘being a tourist’ exhausting with my broken arm.

Coming in my next post: our explorations of Canterbury, Kent.

Dinah, the youngest Nathan

When I set off to record and write my family story it was easy at first: find some facts – write them down in an interesting fashion. But soon I found that having a large, complex family makes a linear narrative difficult. At some point, you have to stop, back track in time, and take up another person’s tale, sometimes crossing again the same dates in history, sometimes even the same places. I am sure, despite my best efforts, that I have had to repeat some information in order to orientate the reader.

After my first early draft was completed I decided that I would take the family matriarch, Dinah as a central unifying character, around whom the rest of the stories revolve. She became the pivotal force within the book, just as she had been in her family and community on the West Coast of New Zealand.

Dinah Hansen c1915.

This ‘little old lady’ had once been a little girl and young woman; something I had to conjour for my readers. Here are some excerpts from page 56 of To Live a Long & Prosperous Life:

Dinah means ‘to be judged; vindicated’. The biblical Dinah was the eleventh child of Jacob and Leah. Dinah (Dina bat Isaachar) was the eleventh and youngest surviving child of Barnett and Julia Nathan: the baby of the extended family. 

drawn from an image in Punch magazine

Born on 2 February 1835, Dinah was 26 years younger than her oldest sister Fanny, who had already been married for two years and had her first child. Dinah’s brother Solomon Lyon Nathan had started his family too, so by the time Dinah arrived she had two nieces and a nephew who were older than her. Her father Barnett was 53 and her mother Julia was 49. Even more remarkable was both Barnett’s elderly parents Mordecai aged 89 and Frances aged 98 were living with the family at 20 Snargate Street, making a three generation household.

When Dinah was six, the family, including Dinah’s grandmother Frances Nathan, (Independent means) Dinah’s parents Barnett (China dealer) and Julia Nathan and some of her siblings (and a family servant), were recorded at 20 Snargate Street, Dover on the evening of the 1841 census:

Nathan Family, Dover, Kent 1841 UK census

As we don’t have any photographs or even much direct information about Dinah as a child, we have to make do with building a picture of what was happening around her at the time:

Dinah was like any other little Victorian girl, perhaps the favoured ‘baby’ of the family, cosseted and petted, but also privileged to have a stable and secure upbringing. We can imagine her watching the comings and goings on the street below from the high windows, playing with her dolls and discouraged from boisterous games with her brother. Taking walks out along the beach front or to the parks on the Sabbath or visiting other shops with her mother during the week. Learning to count by naming how many oranges, lemons or figs her father was putting in the customer’s basket, and learning to reckon with a pencil on the corner of the wrapping paper. Applying herself to her lessons and learning about running a home at her mother’s side, knowing with certainty her future role as a wife and mother was likely already mapped out.

Navigating the life of Dinah, her children and her family has been an incredible adventure: discovering new places and faces along the way – pictures, stories and tales of events great and small. Creating a lasting document that brings all these to life has been another ‘adventure’ full of challenge and small triumphs too.

Mordecai’s mark

In my last post I wrote about the personal meaning stone has for me. Of course as a genealogist, stone also represents the earliest record I have found for my Nathan line. A headstone in the Canterbury (Kent) Jewish Cemetery records the passing of Mordecai Nathan (c1746-1841), and also of his wife Frances. This is where the title for this blog originates: written in stone. Mordecai ‘Mark’ Nathan was the paternal grandfather of Dinah Nathan, and was living with her family at 20 Snargate Street, Dover, when he died. He was also one of the many members of this family to ‘Live Long’

The headstone image appears on Cemetery Scribes which has provided translations of the Hebrew and therefore identifies with more certainty Jewish individuals and their family connections. This website also links to a sister site Synagogue Scribes which allows other Hebrew records to be correlated.

Mordecai and Frances Nathan headstone, Canterbury Jewish Cemetery, Kent. Image: Tina Machido

The stone is inscribed firstly in Hebrew and then in English:

NATHAN Mordecai [Mordecai b Nathan] b. 1746 d. 28 Apr 1841 Dover

Mordecai NATHAN of Dover who died 28 Ma[y]? AM 5601 aged 95 years

The Canterbury Jewish Cemetery has a number of Nathans buried close together there: it was at the time, the closest Hebrew burial ground to Dover.

Mordecai’s life was also written in ink: he (along with his wife and son Barnett and his family) is mentioned in a couple of small newspaper articles, just two weeks before he died. This valuable snippet of information which details the family and where they lived was first located and published in the Lawns of Lanner booklet by HLR. I located this image (on very scratchy microfilm) in the Dover Chronicle 17 May 1841,  with the help of Dover library. This appears on page 69 of To Live a Long & Prosperous Life along with other close family events of 1841.

The reporter got the ages wrong (later corrected); Mordecai was 96 and Frances was 104. Dinah Nathan, baby of the family, was a little girl of six years.

Mordecai’s death entry is in the civil records in Dover in 1841, just before the first UK census. Mordecai’s grandson and Dinah’s brother Nathaniel Nathan registered the death.

Another valuable source of information is The Jews of Dover and Their Records (1996) by Martyn C.Webster. I was given a copy of Webster’s work by Jim Smith, a researcher from California, who is descended from the Reuben family of Dover. We initially thought we might be connected, until I found we are not linked to the Reuben name as was first thought.

Webster’s book listed Dover burials in the Canterbury Cemetery, these came from a list of headstone transcriptions and another source: A record book of births deaths and marriages of Jews in Canterbury Dover, Deal and Ramsgate 1831-1870.  This last source is in the Hartley Institute, University of Southampton and probably holds further records on our extended family, if I ever get a chance to get there I will certainly be looking for more. Synagogue Scribes reference this resource for many of their entries.

From Webster’s notes we see that Mordecai (died mg [morning] 4 o’clock) and is buried in plot M2. Other Nathans are in plots M1, M3, M4 M7 and M8. Plots M5 and 6 are also likely to have Nathan family members – perhaps children who did not have headstones.

Although these records are brief, they allow us to anchor the beginning of the family tree in time and place. We know from his patronym that Mordecai’s father was named Nathan (Mordecai ben Nathan  – ben means ‘son of’) but other than that we know little more of his line because of the nature of Jewish genealogy, as Family Tree DNA have succinctly put it:

­

What are the challenges of Jewish genealogy?
Jewish genealogy includes many challenges that mean more frequent and problematic road blocks for the Jewish genealogist than for the non-Jewish genealogist. The following are some of these challenges:

Surnames that pass from father to son were not adopted until the late 1700s and early 1800s.
Unrelated paternal lines have adopted the same surnames.
Related paternal lines have adopted different surnames.
Surnames have been adapted to the country where descendants live today.
In many cases, traditional paper trail records are lacking.
The Jewish population is endogamous (intermarrying).

From this point, recorded in ink and stone 175 years ago, the rest of the story unwinds.

Indebted

My research and writing have been based upon work of other family members who have been researching for far longer than I have. Not long after I became interested in Lawn family history I attended a workshop at Ferrymead Heritage Park in my then role as a Museum Educator at South Canterbury Museum. Looking across the room I saw another attendee who looked vaguely familiar, a man with a friendly smile, who, when I sidled around the room to glance at his name tag I saw he was a LAWN – Peter Lawn of Blacks Point Museum. Peter and I got talking and quickly established our family connections; he was the son of Bob and Betty Lawn of Reefton, descendants of John Lawn (1840-1905), brother to my James Lawn (1837-1928), making us third cousins once removed.

Peter alerted me to the fact that there was a book and family tree, compiled by Helen and the late Ross Lawn (descendant of Thomas Lawn and Sarah Hart) for a family reunion in the 1980s – a reunion that somehow my immediate family missed. Peter kindly sent me a copy of the tree and the booklet that explained a little of the history of the Lawn family. The tree I received had been revised in 1989 after the reunion (when more information had come forward). It was remarkable: beautiful calligraphy on seven A1 pages, it covered the many Lawns who were descended from the original Cornish family beginning with William Lawn (b Gwennap 1777). The six sheets of the tree covered: