© 2016 David E. Spencer
"The Prologue"
The linking of the Somerset Harveys into the main body of my wife's ancestry is a little bit of genealogical detective work whose outcome rally pleased me. My father-in-law told me that his granddad came from east Yorkshire and that he had married a girl from Somerset called Mary whose family had been teasel growers in Somerset and had the idea of growing them in Yorkshire near to the woolen industry. At this time only the 1881 census was available for family historiansto consult. We first found the marriage of Mary Caroline Harvey to Henry Teal in 1876 in Bubwith East Yorkshire. This also revealed Mary's father to be William Harvey. The 1881 census came to the all important question of Mary's birthplace. The answer was recorded as "Somerset, Kington". My maps of Somerset and searches of Somerset parished online revealed none called "Kington". I then tried all my West Country contacts but all to no avail. Then the idea dawned on me - in our modern age we hear a range of English accents on a regular basis but how many times had the enumerator spoken with someone from Somerset in 1881?. I looked again at a list of Somerset places and Keinton Mandeville leapt out at me. Had the enumerator heard Mary simply say "Keinton" and he had interpreted this phonetically as "Kington"?. A few weeks later we were on a genealogy trip to Exeter record office so we decided to call in at the old Somerset County Record office on the way home. This was not today's modern Somerset CRO - this was the old office in a disused school building. I put my idea to the archivist using my best Yorkshire accent to be the enumerator and a poor attempt at a "Zummerzet" accent for Mary. The archivist was somewhat sceptical but pointed me towards the Keinton Mandeville parish records. Bingo! - searching the baptismal register for Mary's baptism revealed Mary Caroline Harvey, daughter of William. Further searching revealed more family members and more of Mary's ancestry. Of course some years later with the release of the 1891 census Mary and a different enumerator managed to spell out "Somerset, Keinton Mandeville" but this did not detract from my earlier satisfaction in unravelling a mystery!.
Mary Caroline was born in Keinton Mandeville in 1849. She died at Ellerton Priory in East Yorkshire in 1921 and was buried at Holme-on-Spalding Moor, East Yorkshire. Mary's father William was indeed a teazel grower in Keinton Mandeville in the 1851 and 1861 censuses. In 1871 he is a "Teazel spittler" at Melbourne in Yorkshire. He married Jemima Cabbell in 1847 at Keinton Mandeville . He was born in Keinton Mandeville in 1822, the son of another William Harvey, an agricultural labourer born in 1792 in Keinton Mandeville and his wife Elizabeth.