I began to trace the ancestors of James Thomas William
Stentiford from the date of the marriage of Mary Ann Stentiford to James Thomas
Kellard on 24 Sep 1845. Mary Ann's father was a shipwright and her
family lived in Dock (see Issue 21). By the time of the 1851 census,
Thomas Stentiford had died and her widowed mother, then aged 63, was
earning her living as a grocer.
There were Kellards in Dock at this time and until recently it was
thought that this was where James Thomas Kellard was born - certainly it
was what he told the census enumerator in 1851. But in the 1871 census,
he said he was a British Citizen and gave his birthplace as Halifax,
Nova Scotia where there were also families with the name of Kellard at the time of
his birth in or around 1819. However, by 1881, he was again claiming to have been
born in Devonport, formerly called Dock!
