Mary Septima Taylor

This archive’s tree is an ancestor chart, so it draws the direct line and nothing beside it. The eight brothers and sisters proved from the GRO index had nowhere to be drawn at all. This is the other direction — the descent, with the wife as a column rather than a suffix, the children spanning both parents because they are both parents’, and each one’s brothers and sisters under the parent they belong to.

The shape carries the argument. Her side runs back four documented generations — to a shoemaker who died in the Devon County Asylum and a Scotswoman born at Haddington in 1814. His stops dead at his own parents, named on one 1908 enrolment card and on no register anywhere. Nobody has ever found a brother or sister of Pablo Armando Lerena, and the empty column says so where a sentence would not.

The whole sibling group was recovered by searching on the mother, not the child. One query against findmypast’s Devon Baptisms — surname Taylor, mother’s forenames Mary Ann Helen — returns the family at Northam, St Margaret in a single page. Searching child by child would have taken seven searches and could never have proved the group complete.

The control ran first. Agnes Walker Taylor, the one child whose birth this archive held to the day and the address — 3 August 1889, 2 Fore Street — was looked for before anything else. She is there, baptised eighteen days later.

Mary Septima’s own baptism is in it, and this archive had never held it. 30 October 1884, six weeks after her birth; father William, mother Mary Ann Ellen; Northam, St Margaret, South West Heritage Trust reference 1843A/PR/1/16. It is the first time her parents are named together in a parish register rather than in a tree, a census or an index — and the earliest record of her life, twenty-seven years before she married at Wynberg.

And there is no Edith. For three weeks this archive has carried a strong candidate for a seventh daughter — Taylor, Edith, Bideford, September quarter 1882 — because the tree says ten children and names nine, and because Septima means seventh. Lucy is baptised 31 August 1881 and Mary Septima 30 October 1884, and the register holds nothing between them. The candidate falls exactly in that gap, and every sibling on either side of her is in the book.

The only two Edith Taylors baptised in Devon near that date are other people’s. Edith Taylor, 21 November 1883 at Bideford, mother Maria; Edith Mary Taylor, 8 April 1885 at Bideford, mother Elizabeth. Two more William Taylors, identified by their wives. The candidate is downgraded from strong to weak, and what survives it is only an unsourced count in a family tree and the meaning of a name. What was corrected →

What it does not prove. A child can be born and die before baptism; a child can be baptised in another parish or another denomination; a register can have a gap. But this family baptised promptly and baptised at Northam, seven times across fifteen years, and the one child the count requires is the one child who is not there.

1. The Taylor chart
2. The descent, drawn
3. The baptism register, Northam — and her own baptism
4. Her mother was never registered
5. The name is a count
6. The line behind her
7. Northam and Bideford, north Devon
8. The ship
9. The marriage — and it is not where the story expects it
10. The crossings, and a last voyage home
11. Her end
12. The Taylors had horses too
13. What she was doing at sixteen
14. The eight-year hole — and two ships that might close it
15. Her brothers and sisters, taken off a tree
16. One set of twins, and a wife who was not who the tree said
17. They moved to where a relative already was
18. Kathleen, and a household nobody here had opened
19. The three addresses, and what a free census can reach
20. The two questions the Brayley line turns on
21. The Devon tooling, and what each source can actually reach
22. Neither of them went to sea
23. Northam is in Devon

This archive has been looking for Mary Ann Hellen Brayley’s birth entry since September and should stop. She was born 20 May 1843 at St Bartholomew’s, City of London, and FreeBMD holds no Mary Brayley and no Mary Brailey in the June quarter of 1843 anywhere in England and Wales — recorded then as an absence awaiting a better search.

So the question was put the other way round. Not where is she? but which children of her parents are in the book at all? — surname Brayley on loose matching, mother’s maiden surname Temple, across 1838–1852, both sexes. Two come back.

The pattern dates itself. The couple’s two earliest children — Isabella, about 1841, and Mary Ann Hellen, 1843, both born in London — are absent. The two later ones, John Walker (Holborn, 1845) and Georgina Margaret (Bideford, 1850), are present. Birth registration was not compulsory on parents until the Act of 1874, in force from 1875; the duty lay on the registrar, under-registration in the 1840s is well attested, and it fell heaviest on the urban poor. The 1851 census describes this household as “Shoemaker Wife Pauper”.

So she was almost certainly never registered, and the null is now double and comes from two directions: FreeBMD under her own name, the GRO under her mother’s. It is a conclusion rather than a certainty — a registration under a spelling the index does not associate with Brayley at all cannot be excluded by any search. What was corrected →

The spelling control is built into the result. The query said Brayley and the index returned Brailey both times, so the two absences are not an artefact of how the name was spelled.

Documented On 20 May 1935 Mary Septima landed at Southampton, aged 50, off the Balmoral Castle. Her address in Britain is given as “c/o Dalling, Fore St, Northam, Devon” — her elder sister Isabella Temple, who had married Henry Dalling at Northam in 1900. She was in England five weeks, and sailed for the Cape again on 28 June 1935 aboard the Armadale Castle.

She died on 15 November 1935, four and a half months after she got home. The section below gives the cause. Nothing in the paperwork says she knew, and this archive does not claim she did — but she was fifty years old, she had not been to Devon in the record since 1909, and she went back to her sister’s house in the parish she was born in one summer before she died.

Documented And the 1909 crossing corroborates the thing this page argues hardest. On 19 February 1909 the Guelph landed “Mrs M T Lerena” at Southampton, and on the line directly below her “Mast. L Lerena” — Master, a boy, almost certainly Roque Luis Armando, then three. She is travelling as Mrs Lerena with his son, two years before the wedding at St Dominic’s. The purser wrote her down as ENGLISH and the boy as BRITISH COLONIAL.

Inferred Then it happens a third time, a generation later. On 12 April 1957 Juanita Ramona Lerena — Roque’s daughter, Pablo Armando’s granddaughter, born 16 June 1937 — landed at Southampton, single, occupation BALLET TEACHER. Her address in Britain: “Vicosa, Westward Ho, N Devon” — the village adjoining Northam. Three generations of this family crossed to the same four square miles of north Devon: the daughter of the house in 1909 and 1935, and her granddaughter in 1957.

This archive carried William Taylor — Mary Septima’s father — as a coachman. The censuses say something sharper. In 1891, aged 65, the enumerator writes his occupation as:

“Cab driver retired sergt p cavaloy” — cab driver; retired sergeant, cavalry

By 1901 he is a widower of North Street, Northam, and simply an army pensioner. His eldest son drove a cab beside him; his second son was a footman.

So the woman Pablo Armando married came from horses as well. The family story about him is entirely a horse story — trainer, breeder, stables on the Koeberg Road, four generations of jockeys after him. It turns out her father spent his working life in the saddle and on the box: a cavalry sergeant, then a cab driver in a small Devon town.

That is not evidence of anything, and it does not explain how they met. But this archive has spent a long time treating Mary Septima as the ordinary English half of the story, and that was plainly wrong. Horses stand behind both sides of this marriage.

The Exeter Diocesan Board of Education examined the pupil teachers and monitors of Devon’s Church schools each year, and printed the results by name, age and parish. In April 1901, under Set II — monitors over sixteen, and pupil teachers in their first year, eighty-eight candidates were examined. In Class III, between a boy from Honiton and a girl from Honiton, sits:

“Mary Septima Taylor, 16, Northam”

She was training to be a schoolteacher. A pupil teacher stayed on at her own village school and learned the work in it, examined once a year, paid a little. It is the first thing this archive knows about her that is not a date.

And it sharpens the shape of her life to something quite startling. A pupil teacher at Northam in April 1901. “Mrs Lerena”, crossing from Cape Town to Southampton with a small son, by February 1909. Eight years, and the whole distance between a north Devon parish school and an Argentine horseman’s household at the Cape. What happened in those eight years is the largest thing still missing from her story.

The newspaper OCR is poor and the lists run together. Her own entry reads unambiguously in both papers; the class boundaries around it were reconstructed from a damaged column and should be re-checked against the image before anything is built on them.

A pupil teacher at Northam in April 1901. “Mrs M T Lerena”, crossing from Cape Town to Southampton with a three-year-old son, in February 1909. Between those two facts lie eight years and six thousand miles, and they are, I think, the largest answerable gap left in this family’s story — larger than where Pablo Armando was born, and sitting in records that survive and are indexed.

The outward passenger lists give a clean negative first: no Mary Taylor of her age left Britain for South Africa at all, in the whole range 1890–1960. But the index frequently carries no forename. Drop it, and filter on surname, age and destination, and two candidates appear in exactly the right window:

That was a strange thing for this archive to tolerate. It has opened Montevideo parish acts from 1789 while carrying Devon marriages from the 1900s on a tree — and England is the best-documented jurisdiction it touches. All five husbands are now named, from the Devon parish registers, and it took under an hour.

Two of them married eleven days apart, in the same church. Irene on 30 August 1900 and Isabella on 10 September — and their mother Mary Ann Helena had died on 21 April that year. Both daughters married within five months of burying her. Nothing here had shown that, because neither husband had a date against his name.

The table of the nine children above is now generated from the same file these names were written into. It used to be typed into the page by hand — so when the data gained five husbands, the page would have gone on saying m. Dalling.

This archive had already noticed that Kathleen Georgina and William John were both born in November 1870 and written, against his name, “twins, or one date is wrong” — and then left it there.

The 1871 census settles it. Both are in the house as infants on 2 April 1871, and their parents’ banns were called at Bideford on 9 January 1870. Two children of one mother, both alive in a household fifteen months after the banns, cannot be separate births. They are twins, and the GRO index proved it a second way on 8 October 2026: her registration is page 490 and his is 489, consecutive entries in one quarter.

This section used to say the family had TWO sets, and that was wrong. The second pair was an unnamed twin of Irene in 1879, who came from a tree and was inferred to be a girl because otherwise the Septima arithmetic failed. The GRO index shows Irene alone — no second birth to this mother that year, of either sex — and the Northam register baptises her by herself. There is one set of twins in this family, not two. What was corrected →

And William John’s wife was not Fanny Ellen Jefferey. The 1901 census names her Fanny Helen, with children Gladys Helen and William Archibald; the 1911 census dates the marriage to 1892. No Devon record supports the surname Jefferey at all. The only Fanny Jeffreys to marry a Taylor in England married a James William Taylor at Dukinfield, Cheshire, in 1893 — a different man, county and father. Said as a suspicion and not as a finding: that looks like where a tree picked her up.

Her maiden name is therefore unknown again, which is a better position than a wrong one.

And the spelling of one name, three ways in two generations. Her mother-in-law’s own banns of 1870 call her Mary Ann Helena Brayley; this archive has carried Hellen; her daughter is Margaret Helen Walker in the parish book; her granddaughter is Gladys Helen. The name plainly mattered to them and nobody agreed how to spell it.

In 1911 William John was living at Paignton, in south Devon. In 1909 his sister Lucy Elizabeth had her banns called at Churston Ferrers — three miles down the same coast, and eighty miles from Northam where they were both born. The brother was there first.

Irene shows the same thing in reverse. She married at Northam on 30 August 1900 and was living in Bermondsey, south London at the census of 31 March 1901, seven months later — and by 1911 the Burtons were back at Bideford, four miles from where she was born.

It is the same shape this archive keeps finding in Montevideo: people do not move at random, they move to where a relative already is. It is the first time the Devon side has shown it — and it bears on the open question of how Mary Septima came to be at the Cape at about twenty.

The naming runs the same way. William Archibald Taylor (1893) and Horace Henry Charles Dalling (c.1901) both carry their uncle Horace Archibald’s names, in two different households; Ronald William James Dalling carries his grandfather’s. That is the discipline that put Ricardo Juan Carlos on Pablo Armando’s eldest son, for a grandfather nobody can find. It runs on both sides of this marriage.

This archive had only ever read the 1891 and 1901 censuses, both of the parental house. By 1911 William Taylor was nine years dead and the family had scattered — and the 1911 return gives five of Mary Septima’s nieces and nephews at one stroke.

At Northam: Henry Dalling, 32, a gardener (domestic) and five years younger than his wife; Isabella Temple Dalling, 37; and their children Horace Henry Charles (10), Ronald William James (8) and Sylvia Mary (0). At Bideford, the Burtons with Charles William and Albert Edward.

And in the Dalling house, entered as “Sister”: Kathleen Georgina Taylor, 41, single. This archive recorded her with no husband because a tree gave her none, which is evidence of nothing. Now it is evidence — the eldest of the ten, unmarried at forty-one, keeping house with a younger married sister.

Whether she married after 1911 is untested; she lived until 1940. A Find a Grave entry for a Kathleen Georgina Taylor at Brompton Cemetery in London, died 24 July 1942, was seen and not attached — two years out and the wrong city. It is recorded here so that the next person does not attach it either.

Still to do: the 1921 census, untouched, and the last before the 1931 returns were destroyed — by then Mary Septima was at the Cape and her sisters were not. Margaret Bell is not yet found in 1911; Charles William Bell is too common a name to search on.

Three of the children were born at named addresses. An address is what a census is searched on, so these should place the household without a name search — and one of the three now does.

The other two were first written off as untestable. That verdict was wrong, and it was wrong in an instructive way: it tested the census route and was written as though every route had been tried. The UK National Archives had not been looked at once, and Geneva Place turns out to be a council school whose admission registers survive for 1885–1949. See The British Archives.

What has to be answered before the ascent can go further, and why neither is closed.

The free English sources, assessed for what they hold and what they silently do not.

Northam parish contains Appledore, and the Royal Navy registers held no Taylor of this family — which left the merchant service open and looked like days of work, because crew lists are filed by ship and not by man.

It was not days of work. The 1891 census had already answered it, and had been in this archive since 16 September. William John, twenty, is a cab driver like his father; Horace Archibald, nineteen, is a footman in domestic service. Two brothers, two land trades, on one page — at exactly the ages a life at sea would have begun.

Documented In the 1921 census Lucy Elizabeth Sweet — 39, living at 23 Hamilton Street, Devonport — has her birthplace transcribed “NORTHAM, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE”. Northam is in Devon, two miles from Bideford, and it is where this family comes from. The transcriber met a place name that begins the same way as a county and finished the thought.

That is the second birthplace error in this one census, and it is worth recording as a search trap rather than a curiosity: anyone filtering a national index on Northamptonshire would collect her, and anyone filtering on Devon would lose her. A birthplace in a transcript is the transcriber’s reading of a word, not the household’s statement of a place.

The same entry carries something else. Lucy called her daughter Kathleen — for the eldest sister who never married and was an invalid in another sister’s house. The naming discipline this archive keeps finding in the Uruguayan acts runs just as plainly through a Devonport street in 1921.