Four Weddings

Being a family historian gives you ample opportunities to study the names people give to their children. Plenty of nice safe choices in the Stentiford family - William, John, Elizabeth and Ann abound - in fact, there are so many people with these names, it becomes difficult to sort one from another.

Just occasionally, you wonder what on earth possessed the parents to saddle their offspring with a more unusual choice - poor little George Redvers Courtenay Buller Stentiford never reached his first birthday but how did Uretta Matilda Stentiford feel about her name when she grew up?

These thoughts came while looking for something else on that very useful site - www.freebmd.org.uk - and, there, right at the end, in a list of marriages for the June Quarter of 1910 was yet another set of names - Daisy Bell Stentiford - very cute for a three-year old but perhaps not so for an adult?

In fact, that list of marriages contains the names of two sisters - Daisy Bell and her sister Florence Dorothy - who both came from Kingskerswell, a village famous now for being a notorious traffic bottleneck on the Newton Abbot to Torquay road.

Those who take the trouble to leave the main road will find a thriving community with plenty of traces of the rural backwater it once was. In the last century, agriculture and the two stone quarries provided work for most but back at the start of the 20th century, Kingskerswell played a part in the Arts and Crafts movement. Cottage arts classes were held in the village to provide training for young men in crafts and design, many finding work in the Aller Vale Art Pottery Works.

Kingskerswell - Vicarage Corner

Kelly's Directories usually described Edwin John Stentiford, their father, as a haulier but the family had many strings to their bow, including delivering coal around the village. A copy of some of the history of this family can be found in the Ancestral files of FamilySearch but there is an odd discrepancy between that record and the evidence of the GRO Index.

Both agree that Daisy Bell married Frederick James Hill but the FamilySearch record states that the wedding took place on 29 May 1909. This must be a misprint as her name appears in the June Quarter listing for 1910. Daisy Bell, who was born on 8 Dec 1890, died on 23 Dec 1963.

Florence Dorothy must have married a week after her sister, on 5 Jun 1910. She was born in 1882 and died in 1966. Her husband was William Henry Bond, the eleventh of eleven children who grew up in Newton Abbot. His father was a plate-layer on the Great Western Railway.

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