NOT ALWAYS PLAIN SAILING: FINDING A GRAVE

 

As our family’s historians we are all likely to be aware that revealing the nuggets of information about an ancestor in our research can be very uplifting but that equally when you think that everything is plain sailing, to use mixed nautical metaphors, when the wind changes you can feel left up a virtual creek without a paddle.

This is a brief outline of the issues I confronted and the sources I pursued in an effort to locate the final resting place of my paternal Great great grandfather from Starcross to no avail.

James and Susanna Barratt were married in Starcross in 1837 and had a typically large family. They lived for a half century in various cottages in Church Street and New Road. James identified himself as a waterman or boatman in various census returns across the years. When his wife died in tragic circumstances in 1895, he was described in the newspapers as ‘an aged mariner, who of late years has been widely known and respected as one of the Starcross boatmen’. In fact, James bequeathed both his names to three successive generations of my family [to a grandson, great grandson and my brother, a great great grandson] so he has a special interest for me. He was also the subject of ‘family folklore’ in which it was claimed that as a boatman he sailed the boat that was in the form of a ‘cygnet’ that was connected to the well-known Swan boat on the River Exe and now on display in the Topsham Museum. A wholly as yet, unsubstantiated detail but one that has all the romance that many like me hope to discover in their family history researches I am sure. 

   

[The Swan & The Cygnet – well known craft on the River Exe from the 1860’s. The restored Cygnet is the prize exhibit in the Topsham Museum] 

However, as a consequence of my researches at the Devon Heritage Centre in Sowton [DHS], I discovered that both James and Susanna had sad and tragic ends to their lives. Susanna’s death is covered in a separate article, so the focus herein concerns what happened to her husband James, and my efforts to find his final resting place after a few tempestuous final days in his life in March 1904. 

In view of his residence and work in the village for so many years I believe he must have been well known while alive which was borne out to some extent by the newspaper referenced above. As my family had no surviving photographic image of my Great great grandfather, when the Atmospheric Railway museum in Starcross closed down many years ago, I made a belated effort to try and trace where the photographs were subsequently re-located. I recalled when visiting the Museum it had an extensive collection of photographs of local people which had not been displayed. Despite pursuing several lines of enquiry I didn’t make the progress I had hoped and when the trail went cold I abandoned that for the time being.   

Living on his own after the death of his wife, James, was admitted to the Exminster Asylum as a ‘pauper lunatic’ and died within a few days in 1904 aged 89 years. The DHS revealed the register and documents relating to his admission on 25th March 1904. It was said that he had been a heavy drinker some twenty years before and had had a ‘magnificent’ physique and been a good boxer but was now found to be emaciated. He had started showing signs of unusual behaviour a fortnight before his admission which I don’t want to elaborate on here. He was described as being confused and distressed and unable to answer a single question, resisted all attempts to help him and refused to take food offered to him. It was pretty clear he was suffering from some form of dementia.

James Barratt died on 27th March 1904 at the Exminster Asylum after just three days. His death certificate describes the cause of death as ‘senile decay & bronchitis’.

[The Death Certificate of James Barratt, March 1904]

I very much wanted to find where he was buried which is where the fun started. I had presumed that the burial would have been in Starcross parish where he had lived for most of his life. But no such luck, even though his wife was buried in an unmarked grave at St.Paul’s Church a decade earlier. It is perhaps worth mentioning that according to the Churchwarden there were problems with how some records, such as a map of the graveyard and burial locations, had been kept by a previous incumbent that had regrettably resulted in their current whereabouts being unknown. 

Acting on a suggestion from the Churchwarden I subsequently contacted the Starcross History Society around July 2018 and they published an article about my search for the grave of James Barratt on their website. I also took the opportunity to ask if any of the members and readers had or could locate any photographs of ‘Old Starcross’ in a continuing effort to try and identify James or his family when they were living in the village. Grateful for the opportunity to widen the search it was disappointing that I had no responses.

I therefore assumed that my Great Great Grandfather had been buried on the site of the Exminster Asylum where he had actually died. But the search of the records at the Heritage Centre with the help of the Archivist had revealed nothing. 

Acting on the advice of the Archives staff at Sowton, I followed up my research by looking in the burial registers of parishes adjacent to and in the vicinity of Starcross including Kenton, Powderham and Exminster but all with no success. The Cemeteries Officer for Teignbridge DC checked the registers on my behalf for both Dawlish and Teignmouth Cemeteries but also to no avail. Similarly Exeter City’s Bereavement Services confirmed that there was no burial record in their three cemeteries – Higher, Exwick and Topsham. As there seems to have been some issues about the correct spelling of the name – it is ’Barratt’, but it was entered at the Asylum as Barrett and on other occasions as Barnet[t] I had wondered if those looking in registers would pick up on any misspellings or not.

I lived with my frustrations on the matter of locating the grave until I was signposted to staff at the DFHS Tree House resource and research centre in Exeter in March 2020 [in particular the DFHS Committee member, Sue Bond] who agreed to help me and apply her knowledge and skills to my problem in view if the efforts I had already made to solve it myself, albeit unsuccessfully. Despite re-checking all the parishes mentioned above by looking at the original records for the first half of 1904 in order to throw up any issues I had about any variations on the name spelling, they were also unable to locate his grave. They even extended consultation to the burial records for Mary Tavy which was James’s ‘birth parish’ on the DFHS Members' Area just in case he had been returned there as well as checking the Exeter bereavement cards. It was the view of Tree House that a range of experts and others including them and me, had all looked at various sources to no avail.

So the search continues for the grave of James Barratt, my great great grandfather.  What I hoped would be plain sailing in calm waters for my quest to find it, has proven elusive so far. But if any reader can help or comes across it in their own researches I would be very glad to hear from you. Sue Bond gave me the most optimistic response when she advised me to keep looking from time to time as all of a sudden ‘it might just pop up’. I sincerely hope it does.

Les Gibbings