Whatmore Family History

In May last year, I met for the first time a Whatmore second cousin. After we had greeted one another, the next thing he said to me was, ‘Look how dark my skin is. Is it true that the ancestors of our great grandmother Esther Whatmore were from Spain or Portugal?’ My cousin was not the first person to have asked this question. Esther’s maiden name was Manuel and her ancestors were from mid-Wales. Many of the members of  this Manuel family believe they have Iberian ancestry. I have recently re-examined the question of the origin of this family and thought that my findings would be interest to readers of this blog. 

To dispel any suggestion that this might be a wild goose chase, I will begin with some photographs which I think lend support to the idea of Iberian ancestors for the Manuels. I have been unable to trace a picture of Esther Manuel, but have one of her brother Joseph Manuel, one of her son Noah Whatmore and one of a  Manuel from another branch of the family. 

 Joseph Manuel, brother of Esther, with his family in Philadelphia  Copyright: Rhys Whatmore

 Noah Whatmore (my grandfather), one of Esther Manuel’s children  Copyright: Rhys Whatmore

Edward Manuel born 1845 in Wales, who emigrated to Wisconsin, USA. He was distantly related to Esther Manuel.  Copyright: Thelma Vaughan and reproduced here by her kind permission.

Turning to Esther Manuel herself, she was born in 1853 at Rawmarsh near Rotherham in Yorkshire. By 1865  her parents had moved to Sheffield where they lived at Fell Street, Attercliffe in the midst of the steel works. Esther married Joseph Whatmore on 7 April 1873 at St Thomas’s Brightside. They had a large family of children and their story will be told in a future blog. Joseph worked as a puddler and the family were not well off. Joseph died in 1915 but Esther survived until 1932. Joseph and Esther are buried in an unmarked grave at Tinsley Park Cemetery. In her old age, Esther was liable to pawn anything she could get her hands on, and I understand that she was also over fond of the bottle. She is also remembered as being a gentle little woman who loved having her hair brushed. 

Esther’s parents were Evan Manuel and Hannah (nee Cooper). Evan had been born in 1824 in Trefeglwys, near Llanidloes in Montgomeryshire. With the decline of the Welsh woollen industry he had moved with his parents first to Newtown, Montgomeryshire, then to Morda near Oswestry and finally to Toll End, Tipton Staffordshire.  At Tipton, Evan Junior, his father and his brothers had tried their hand at puddling (the melting of iron objects in a furnace prior to them being converted in steel). After a time, Evan and his brothers must have decided  that better paid work was to be had in Yorkshire for by 1851 they were at Parkgate near Rotherham. Here Evan met Hannah Cooper and they were married on 1 June 1851 at Rotherham. Evan Junior died in 1893 and Hannah in 1899. They are buried at St Thomas’s, Brightside. My grandfather Noah, son of Esther Manuel, spent a lot of time with his Manuel grandparents and always spoke with affection of ‘Old Man Manuel’ and the donkeys which he owned and which grazed on the banks of the river Don at the bottom of Fell Street where they lived. Evan Manuel would have been Welsh speaking although he is likely to have been fully bilingual by the time he arrived in Yorkshire.

Evan Manuel, born 1824 was the son of another Evan Manuel who had been born in 1797 at Trefeglwys. He married Esther Thomas  on 6 November 1822. Esther died of dropsy at Toll End on 20 November 1846 and Evan, her husband, eventually returned to Wales. Sadly, he ended up in the Workhouse at Caersws, Montgomeryshire, where he died at the age of 72 on 23 April 1874.  His death certificate states, ‘Death from natural causes, namely extreme fainting in diarrhoea’. In fact he had been poisoned by being given contaminated water to drink from the river which the Workhouse was using because it’s own well was blocked. When the truth became known there was quite an outcry. 

 Caersws Workhouse   Copyright: Rhys Whatmore

Evan Manuel  born 1797 was the result of a liaison between his father – yet another Evan Manuel born at Trefeglwys in 1769 and a certain Sarah Ruff who must have been fairly free with her favours as she had another illegitimate child by another man later on. Evan born 1769 married Elizabeth Ashton on 3 February 1816 and they had several legitimate children. Evan born 1769 died at the Almshouses in Trefeglwys in 1849. Elizabeth his wife also died there in 1853. 

The father of Evan Manuel born 1769 was a John Manuel We don’t have a baptism for him. The early registers for the parish of  Trefeglwys are damaged and are very difficult to read, but we know that he married Hester Morris on 22 February 1757 and that she was baptised on 3 April 1727. Going back beyond this, we have to start speculating. If John was about the same age as his wife then his birth will have been in about 1727. We know of two other Manuels born around this time at Trefeglwys – Levi in 1734  and David in about 1724. It seems likely that these three were brothers. If we look for their likely father we find in the Bishop’s Transcripts for Trefeglwys a David Manuel baptised on 17 February 1690 whose father was a David. 

 Looking towards Trefeglwys  Copyright: Wim Kegel  Reproduced here in accordance with the terms of the site licence which can be viewed here http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

We now come to Dafydd Manuel the poet of Trefeglwys who was buried on 16 May 1726 and is believed to have been over 100 when he died. We know that Dafydd married a Margaret in the 1650s just over the county boundary in Cardiganshire and that they had three children  - Mary (Malen)  born about 1658 ?  Anne born about 1660 ?  and David  (Deio) born about 1662?  This David of about 1662 looks likely to be the father of the David born 1690. The traditional date of Dafydd Manuel’s birth is about 1625. We know his wife died in 1699, so if she was born about the same time as her husband, she would have been about 74 when she died.  

Looking at the IGI, which admittedly is incomplete, the Manuels at Trefeglwys appear to be the earliest ones  in Wales. There were Manuels in Cornwall much earlier, but there is no trace of a gradual spread of these into mid –Wales.  Here family speculations in relation to the Spanish Armada became relevant. Although Phillip II of Spain had married Queen Mary Tudor of England, after her death in 1558 when the protestant Elizabeth came to the throne, relations with Spain rapidly deteriorated. Backed by the Pope, Phillip planned an invasion of England but it was not until 1588  that his fleet of ships set sail. This is not the place to retell the story of the Spanish Armada. That can be read at this link; www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/armada

All that need be told here is that Philip’s plans were unsuccessful and it was decided that the ships should return to Spain. At this point the English blockaded the Channel  so that the Spanish ships had to sail round the tip of Scotland and down the coast of Ireland. During heavy storms over half the Spanish ships were lost. Some Spanish sailors must have been ship wrecked on the Irish coast. Whilst we know that the survivors of the Spanish ships wrecked on the English coast were massacred as they struggled ashore, there was no reason for the Irish not to assist Spanish sailors who made it ashore in Ireland. Was there a young man named Manuel who made it ashore there? If he was about twenty at the time of the Armada, he would only have been aged about 37 in 1625. Did he eventually make his way across the sea into Cardiganshire, directly opposite the east coast of Ireland, marry a Welsh girl and became the father of Dafydd Manuel the poet? We shall probably never know whether this actually happened – but the Manuels in mid-Wales do seem to spring from nowhere. They have no evident link with the Cornish family who were already at St Columb Major by 1542 and had probably migrated in search of work in the tin mines. Nor does there seem any link with the Manuel family of Scotland  which goes back to at least 1156. If we cannot prove a link with the Spanish Armada, I think there is justification for regarding Dafydd Manuel the poet as an early ancestor of ours and I would like to say a little more about him.

 He lived in a cottage called Byrdir on Gwernafon Farm,  Trefeglwys and is regarded by scholars as being in the class of the ‘talen slip’(‘slip of the brow’) i.e. a ‘quick-fire poet’   Stories about him were published in Volume 5 of ‘Y Brython’I am most grateful to Iwan Meical Jones of Dole near Aberystwyth for his kindness in providing the following translation: 

“ One time while travelling through a forest commonly called the Allt Wen he came across the head of a child and said:‘

A dreadful thing, I found a head to the cold hair on the White hill, a bald head without cap or cloth, and its owner had the same respect, his wild blood cold on the White Hill.’ 

Dafydd  Manuel had a son and  a daughter; the son’s thought processes were not very strong. The father wanted to awaken the inspiration of the muse in his children, and it is said the daughter did have some small grasp of it. The children were commonly called Deio and Malen. The old man and his children were once taking wheat to the mill to be ground and on the way Deio said, ‘Daddy you are always babbling about poetry with Malen; I will beat her rotten.’ At that, down came the load from Malen’s head; and the old man, sittting down and looking at the millwheel, said, ‘Well now, all of us put two arms to it to make a “cywydd deuair hirion’  [a complex poetic form].‘To the mill and its useful machinery, that makes noise in the water there.’And then Deio offered up:‘If the mill stops turning Sion and Cadi will shut up.’He meant the miller and his wife. And then Malen tried and said:‘It fills and gladdens every hand, dust of the mill, it grinds silently.’And the father answered and said:‘At this time I will hide my opinion by being silent.’ I

t is said the old poet rhymed the following lines as an insult to some of the inhabitants of the parish of: ‘Llangurig, a mountainous place, where I stayed and found them, between children of Hades and mad chicks, chislers  and beggars of the world.’

 As the oldman and his daughter were driving pigs to Llanidloes fair, a poet of Llangurig was told they were coming. He went to meet them at the tollhouse as they were passing it, and said:‘Send the best pig  with the pin in his head to the top of the town.’Malen the daughter answered: [perhaps she had a pin in her hair]‘Not a pin despite the length of the head [long-headed =intelligent]. Truly , Sir, it is just a wire.’And the man replied to her response:‘Devil take you and your offspring’  

A well-known poem by Dafydd Manuel is ‘Bustl y Cybyddion’ which is a satire on avarice. It is included in ‘Blodeugerdd’ published in 1759 by David Jones.  A copy of this book is in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.

In ‘Montgomeryshire Collections Volume 13 it is said of  Mary and Anne Manuel: ‘The daughters were excellent poets and several of their compositions in MS are in Mr Bennetts possession. Mary was especially noted for her ready wit  and power of repartee  and as a pennillion singer with the harp, a mode of singing which to be effective demands very great skill, a quick ear, and retentive memory. In Bardd Alaw Volume 2 we have a melody associated with her name, namely ‘Hoffedd Merch Dafydd Manuel’ (The delight of David Manuel’s daughter.)                                                

In concluding this post I wish to express my thanks to my Manuel cousin  - Gwyneth Davies of Bridgnorth – whose researches I have drawn on  for much of this account.  I would also like to explain that I have a special affection for this line of my family as my own Christian names commemorate these Welsh ancestors and in particular the memory of ‘David Manuel’ the brother of my great grandmother, who secured for my father his first job during the ‘Great Depression’