A forgotten family branch

 

                                                                        A street in The Rows, Great Yarmouth

Some of my latest posts have been about the Maidment family as finding the parents of my 2 x great grandmother, Mary Maidment, had been a long time quest. But you know, another 2 x great grandmother was also missing parental information and she rarely came to mind. Her name was Sarah Minister and she came from Great Yarmouth. I know very little about her story.

A recent episode of Walking Wartime Britain made me think of her and her ancestors as the show host was in East Anglia. Before the program I didn't know exactly where East Anglia was but apparently it takes in Great Yarmouth, which is a port city and would have been the area where the Nazis landed if they had invaded Britain. Precautions were taken at the time, of course, especially along the coastline but Great Yarmouth would have been hard to defend. The viewers were taken on a brief tour of an area of the town called The Rows, where the roads are narrow paths between the buildings. It made me wonder if that was where Sarah had grown up.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I will be able to determine that as both of Sarah's parents appear to have died prior to 1841 and the earliest Great Yarmouth directory seems to be from 1839. Sarah herself was no longer in Norfolk by that time as she was married in Hoxton, Middlesex in 1838. When had she moved from Great Yarmouth and had she done it on her own? It looks like there is more to find out about her story.

Sources:

GRO certificate of marriage between Benjamin Cavanagh and Sarah Minister 11 September, 1838, District of St John the Baptist, Hoxton, County of Middlesex, (Registration District of Shoreditch)

University of Leicester, Special Collections Online – Historical Directories of England and Wales  https://specialcollections.le.ac.uk/digital/collection/p16445coll4/search/searchterm/1820-1829!1830-1839/field/period!period/mode/exact!exact/conn/and!and 

Images:

By Great Yarmouth's Rows - Row 95 (Kittywitches Row) by Evelyn Simak, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=142379971