The Lillie's Of Langton
The smithy about 1900 some time after the last
Lillie blacksmith left the village
Oh Why Couldn't They Be Famous?
by Peter Lillie
Why, oh why, couldn't my forefathers have been famous? I would even settle
for being locally infamous, but no, all they seem to have been is, well,
normal, anonymous, without having left a dent on the record books. It would
have been so much easier if they had been at least a little infamous; someone
may have then deemed them worthy of a foot-note, or even two, in history.
Don't misunderstand me, I am proud of my family name and set out to trace
the family history (I like to think of it as an ancestral oak but, alas,
it resembles more of a family bush badly in need of a liberal dose of manure
at the moment) in order that my children, and theirs, would have a certain
knowledge of where, and who, they come from. So where to begin? Well, logic
dictates that you begin with your parents. So like many of you have already
done, so I set about questioning my father about everything he could remember
- and then set out to prove or verify his recollections as best I could!
I felt certain that it would be a logical progression, one father backwards
to another, and then another and then another. Soon I felt certain I would
have traced them back to 1066 and beyond, with a bit of luck. Was I mistaken!!
I thought that the family name, being fairly uncommon, would be an advantage.
After all, there are not many Lillies in any telephone book I have ever
come across. I can only imagine the difficulties of someone called Jones
or Smith or Brown. No Lillie, I felt, must make things a little easier.
Wrong again!
My family has never been a great one for filling in forms. A recently acquired
family trait I thought but, no, it appears to be a long-held family tradition.
If a Lillie could avoid filling in a form then it appears they did so.
We seem to be either secretive or an unassuming clan, to say the least.
I know that the Registers of Births, Deaths and Marriages only go back
to 1837 and, if I am to progress further back than that, I must find the
family on the 1851 census as it was the first one to mandatorily demand
a place of birth. It seems that my lot decided to avoid divulging this
information to anyone and dropped from official sight in 1851. Well, then,
they must have been `caught' on the 1861 then! Well, no, they avoided that
one too. The 1871? No, not there either.
I throw myself upon the mercy of you dear readers in the hope that you
may light a candle in the darkness of this family's past or at least point
this fledgling genealogist in the right direction.
So what do I know?
Well, my father was John George Mark Lillie, born in Sunderland in 1926,
and is happily still with us but as a source of information is exhausted!
His father was William Mark Lillie born in 1903 in Sunderland in Woodbine
Street in Hendon. His father was John George Lillie born 1880 in Lawrence
Street, Hendon, Sunderland. His father was William Lillie and for the first
time we have moved away from Sunderland as this particular Lillie was born
in Back Lane Gallowgate in Newcastle in 1849.
OK, so far so good, we have progressed from 2003 all the way back to 1849
and only now have left the confines of Sunderland and journeyed all the
way to the dark regions north of the Tyne. Sorry, but as a Mackem I was
born with an inferiority complex and have been genetically pre programmed
to be sarcastic about all things Newcastle. Imagine my distress upon finding
I am descended from a Geordie; just one of the perils of genealogy I guess,
you never know what you may turn up!
Now, where was I? Oh yes, 1849 William Lillie is born to John Lillie and
his wife Alice (nee Burns) Lillie in Back Lane Gallowgate and is christened
in Saint Andrew's Parish Church. William is the second son, his brother
having been born in 1844 and christened John Henry Lillie. So I have a
family who must appear in Gallowgate on the 1851 census. Well, they don't!!
The young couple and their two sons aged 2 and 7 dropped off the face of
the earth and appear seemingly nowhere along the Tyne or the Wear. As John
is an engine fitter and is working presumably in the shipyards, where has
he and the family gone? I assume he has upheld the family trait of avoiding
officialdom and managed to not fill in the census return. I am sure if
he had known the trouble he would have given his great great great (never
can keep up with how many greats one puts in) grandson he would have diligently
filled out the form.
And what of his father? Well, another thing my family seem to lack is originality:
John Lillie's father was also called John Lillie. It became apparent that
a Lillie father if called John would call his first born John and his second
son William. If a daughter came along she was inevitable called after her
mother, a second daughter would be named after the father's mother. Anyway,
I digress.
John Lillie was a blacksmith working in Aspatria in Cumberland in 1844
where he attends the wedding of his son John Lillie (at this time also
a blacksmith) to Alice Burns. So we have now crossed the country to Cumbria
by 1844 but it appears to be a dead end. For whatever reason the Lillie
family only seemed to be passing through Cumbria in 1844 and left little
or no trace apart from the marriage of John to Alice and the birth of their
first son John Henry, in December 1844.
Apatria Parish Church as it is today
I can only assume that the father John and his apprenticed son John moved
to Cumbria to work, either in the coal mines or on the new railway going
through Aspatria about 1844. The work having dried up, they moved on and
at least the young John and his wife appear in Gallowgate in 1849. Again
a presumption on my part but, as he is now described as an engine fitter,
perhaps he has put his metal working skills as a blacksmith to good effect
on the newfangled steam ships being built along the Tyne. If so, did he
bring his father there as well?
My father seems to recollect that the family came to Sunderland via Bedlington
(in fact, he says a cousin of his was the North East tap dancing champion
in the twenties and that she came from Bedlington) and before that, we
were Scots, probably Lowland Scots, but he's not certain. Of course, there's
also family stories of our family having fought alongside Bonny Prince
Charlie but I think it more likely we were actually on the other side,
if involved at all. Still, I doubt at my rate of progress that I will ever
get that far back to prove or disprove the story.
Anyway, there you have it, a potted history of the Lillies so far. If any
of you good readers should come across a stray Lillie on your travels please
point them my way so I may look after them properly. We can't have too
many Lillies roaming about.
Author Profile: Peter Lillie is 50 years old and works for an agency finding
work for freelance personnel in the broadcasting industry. Peter was born
in Sunderland and is married to Judith who was also born in Sunderland.
They have three grown up children. Peter began researching his family history
in 2002 and most of his information has been gathered from the internet
and various certificates. His other interests include watercolour painting
and Victorian literature.
AND IF ONLY THEY’D KEPT STILL !!
By Pam Smith July 2003
If tracing the Lillies is complicated, tracing
the ancestry of their wives seems to be just as bad! Alice Burn ran
off to Gretna with John Lillie in 1844. They then married “officially”
at Aspatria a few months later. From her second marriage certificate
and the family bible, its clear that Alice was the eldest daughter of John
Burn, a Railway Clerk, and that the family actually hailed from the district
of Alnwick. The only appropriate baptism that I have been able to
find is one at Long Horsley in 1819 and the parents here are a John &
Mary Burn (visiting from Alnwick). This looks promising, but no other
children appear to have been baptised at that parish. The Alnwick
registers reveal that a John Burn married a Mary Faldon in Alnwick in 1810.
Again, this appears to be the only possible appropriate marriage.
The marriage entry itself yields very little information, but the subsequent
baptism of their first child, William, at Alnwick in 1811, shows that John
Burn came from nearby Netherwitton. His wife, Mary Faldon, however,
came from Whickham in Durham - quite a distance from Alnwick in the early
19th century!
The Faldons of Whickham have already appeared in our
family tree. John Lillie’s mother was Alice Faldon before her marriage
and the census shows that she had been born in Whickham. Her parents
were Thomas Faldon and Mirrell Field. The name Faldon was not common
in Durham at that time and it has since became apparent that Alice and
Mary must have been sisters. This means that John Lillie and Alice
Burn would have been first cousins and could explain why they had charged
off to Gretna for their “first” marriage. Perhaps their parents didn't
approve, or perhaps it was just Blacksmith tradition or romanticism.
Certainly, their first child, John Henry, had been born a respectable eleven
months after the first marriage! The “cousinship” between John and
Alice could also go some way to explaining how a Blacksmith from Berwickshire
came to marry a Railway Clerk’s daughter from Alnwick. Its evident,
from the marriage register, that Mary Burn could at least sign her name,
so its possible that she wrote to her sister about work for Blacksmiths
on the new railways. Its also possible that John Lillie originally
stayed with his aunt’s family (possibly in Aspatria), met his cousin Alice
there and fell in love. I wonder if his aunt ever regretted sending
that letter to her sister ?!
If this is all correct, it helps to solve the problem
of how John Lillie met Alice Burn. However, there are still many
mysteries surrounding the lives and marriages of their parents. For
instance, how on earth did John Lillie’s father (also John Lillie and a
Blacksmith from Berwickshire) meet Alice Faldon from Whickham? How
did Mary Faldon come to be in Alnwick by 1810 and how had she met John
Burn, a Farmer’s son from Netherwitton? How had John Burn come to
be Railway Clerk and where were he and his family living when John Lillie
eloped with his daughter?
Useful information regarding the first marriage has
recently come from Geoff Nicholson. Alice Faldon’s baptism record
shows that the family were living at what looked like “Sw. Fact., Whickham”
and Geoff has told me that this is most likely to be “Swalwell Factories”.
These factories were set up by a Quaker family at the end of the 17th century
much on the lines of places like Bourneville. A century later, nearly
all of the ironwork for Nelson’s navy was being produced here. One
of the factories, at nearby Winlaton Mill, used outworker Blacksmiths from
all over the country for the making of small iron objects. This would
give John Lillie of Berwickshire a good reason to be in the Whickham area.
As for Mary Faldon being in Alnwick, nothing more
has come to light. Swalwell Factories apparently closed at the end
of the Napoleonic Wars. Its possible that Thomas Faldon took his
family up to Alnwick before that time, though I have no idea why.
I had hoped that the Burn family would link in with the famous Robbie Burns.
A bit of culture in the family wouldn’t go amiss. Alas, this is unlikely
to be the case. John Burn was apparently the son of William Burn
and Isabel Ramsay and they hailed from a lovely little farm out in the
wilds of Northumberland - just down the road from East Teviotdale - territory
of “a most predatory and vicious family”* - the Burn Riding Clan!
? Taken from “The Steel Bonnets” by George MacDonald
Fraser
Current research
I have spent a considerable amount of effort in looking
for the living descendants
of John Lillie and Alice Burn who married on the 22 July
1844 at St Kentigans church Aspatria
following a civil marriage on the 3 February 1844 at
Gretna Green. I have had great success with the exception of their second
child called Thomas the first Thomas Faldon only lasting two years,
So far without any clues if he produced any little Lillies
at all.
I have a hypothesis that all Borders and Northumberland
Lillies are of the same family and am moving to gain the evidence that
will prove it. I have noticed that the expansion of trade in the 1700s
and the industrial revolution gave any man with a trade (Carpenter, Mason
and of course Blacksmith) the income to take on a wife and feed children.
When the male children grew up and also became blacksmiths and then wanted
to set up their own family, they had to move to another village to do so,
therefore causing the spread of the family throughout the northern counties?
Michael. John. Lillie
e-mail LillieMike@AOL.COM
FROM 1690 UP TO
JOHN LILLIE & ALICE BURN
LINKS TO JOHN LILLIE & ALICE BURN'S SIX CHILDREN
JOHN HENRY
LILLIE & ELLEN DOUGLAS
THOMAS FALDON
LILLIE
WILLIAM
LILLIE & ELIZABETH JANE BARACLOUGH
THOMAS LILLIE & JANE
HANNAH COWEN
MARY
ALICE LILLIE & THOMAS WILLIAM BARNFATHER
DAVID
BURN LILLIE & ANNIE ROBSON
LINKS TO OTHER INTERESTING SITES
DUNNS
TOWN SITE
MODERN DAY GAVINTON
VILLAGE SITE
THE BORDERS
FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETY
THE NOTHUMBERLAND
& DURHAM FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETY
THE HISTORY
OF LANGTON & GAVINTON
