Latest update to 'Descendants of Admiral Cornthwaite Ommanney'

An update of 'Descendants of Admiral Cornthwaite Ommanney' (July 2024) is now available here.  

Rumours of Memorial’s Demise Greatly Exaggerated

On 30 June 1923 a visitor to St John’s, Westminster reported in Notes and Queries the following inscription on a tombstone:

Here lieth the Remains of Rear Admiral Cornthwaite Ommanney who died the 26th day of March 1801 aetat 65. Also the Remains of Martha Ommanney his widow who died on this 18th day of March 1813 aetat 65. Likewise Edmund Woods Ommanney their grandson, son of Henry Manaton and Ann died 19th May, 1813, aged 2 years...

Fourteen years later, a correspondent to the same journal (27 March 1937) recorded that:

One of the most interesting of the memorials was badly broken in moving it, involving the loss of part of the inscription to Rear-Admiral Cornthwaite Ommanney (died 1801). Fortunately this inscription had already been placed on record in ' N. and Q.' of June 30, 1923.

Reading these notes I rashly assumed that the memorial had been lost altogether - “badly broken” would seem serious enough to warrant disposal. Not so, it turns out. The stone is in fact still there, propped against a neighbouring building. And indeed the inscription continues beyond the excerpt quoted above, as follows (the material in square brackets is illegible or missing, but I add my assumed completion):

[Antho]ny Tenterden Hollist

[text missing] died May 6th, 1[837]

Hasler Hollist [text missing] 6th 1832, died May 1st 1...

[Cap]ron Hollist [born May 6] 1834. Died May [3rd 1836]

Cornthwaite’s granddaughter Frances Georgiana married Hasler Hollist (b.1799); Anthony and Capron were two of their children who did not survive infancy. It would seem likely that the Hasler Hollist referred to on the inscription is not in fact the father (for whom the date of the memorial would not make sense, and who was not in any case a blood relative of Cornthwaite and Martha), but another short-lived, but otherwise unrecorded child.

My thanks to David Bingham of The London Dead blog for spotting the inscription and taking the trouble to let me know. https://thelondondead.blogspot.com

Colorado

I have tended to pay more attention to those Ommannies who remained on the eastern side of the Atlantic (or went further east still) than those who drifted in the other direction. As anyone who has googled the name will know, however, there are certainly Ommannies in North America. This is the partial story of one of the earliest of them. 

Arthur Ross Ommanney was born on 14 May 1854 in Surrey. In 1872, at the age of 17, he arrived in the USA, seemingly on his own. What was he doing there?

I had no real leads until I identified him as the ‘young Ommanney’ (no first name given) who features in the journal published by Allayne Beaumont Legard under the name Colorado (1872).  You can find a copy online at https://archive.org/details/colorado00lega

 Legard was an Englishman who was serving in the army in Canada when he decided to embark on a three-month trip to Colorado. He arrived in New York in March 1872 intending to meet a friend, only referred to as ‘HPB’ in the journal but actualy Harry (later Sir Harry) Paul Burrard. On arrival, though, he found not Burrard but a stack of letters from him. Legard tracked Burrard down to St John, New Brunswick, where Burrard was supposedly looking after the 17-year old Arthur Ommanney (‘I all by myself, HPB positively declining coming even as far as New York, and saying that he had sent young  Ommanney, who had been entrusted to his care, on to Denver by himself… There is a beautiful mammoth hotel at St. John now, which is most reasonable in its charges. I, however, left it, and took up my quarters at a boarding house with young Ommanney, who had been entrusted by his confiding parents to the care of H.P.B. Had many and long talks with H.P.B. but failed to impress upon him that his conduct was in any way strange or different from what it should have been…’)

HPB (who was in St John to get married) somehow palmed Arthur off onto Legard permanently, and the pair then travelled on to Colorado.

The question is how Arthur had come to find himself alone in the US at that age. So far as we know, his parents were living in peaceful retirement in Putney.

They had an eventful trip to Colorado:

Left Denver at 7am on horseback…When we got in every atom of skin was blisterd off our faces, and Ommanney was nearly snow blind…

Ommanney went bull whacking to get a sack of flour, and encountered a ditch and a surly Yank. The former he had some difficulty in getting over. The latter utterly floored him, for seeing that he was new at work, with Yankee generosity stubbornly ignored the idea of helping him. He pointed out the bag of flour, and then collected his family to witness his (Ommanney’s) frantic struggles to get it to the waggon, while he indulged in sneering and vulgar remarks upon once having been an English gentleman himself, and the necessity of being able to work hard in this country. Ommanney, however, got the flour on the waggon and safe home…

Once in Colorado, Legard bought a 320-acre property in the Wet Moutain valley in Custer County, near Rosita. This he left in Ommanney’s hands when he returned to New York and embarked for Southampton in June 1872. (‘Got power of attorney correctly fixed up for Ommanney to act for me, and deposited it at the bank… Sorry to leave Ommanney to such a lonely occupation, but I think he really likes it. He is a good lad…’)

We do not know what happened to Arthur directly after that, but around 1880 he married Maria Wright. They had six children, the first born in Colorado in 1880. In 1890 there is a record of the family arriving back in the US after a transatlantic voyage from Glasgow. They were divorced in 1900 at Denver.

On 14 May 1907 married a Norwegian, Bertha Aandahl, and they had children.

By 1910 he was a chicken farmer at San Bernardino, California. In 1920 he was a miner living at Seattle. Arthur died on 1 March 1925 at Seattle.

A photograph of the younger George Campbell Ommanney

From the Church Portrait Journal, Vol.3 (1882)

The 1929 Ommanney tree

Some time ago - so long that I had forgotten until I was recently reminded of it - I saw a listing in a library suggesting that they held a large Ommanney family tree from the early 20th century. I had for a while intended to motor down there and take a look, but I never quite got round to it. No matter. I have recently received a series of photographs of this same document from an Ommanney descendant who also has a copy (my thanks to Jayne, and her brother).

It has set several hares running and I will be producing an update of my document Descendents of Admiral Cornthwaite Ommanney shortly. Somehow, once you have a tip-off in genealogy, it is much easier to track down further details. And the 1929 tree is a hatful of tip-offs.

What is most striking is just how accurate it is. Of course, in 1929 they were closer to the action than we are now. But I can sit here calling up all sorts of documentation from the 18th to the 20th centuries at the touch of a button; they had to pack a dozen valises and jump into the Bentley for a weekend jaunt down to the library at Portsmouth to achive the same thing. And yet almost every new detail on the tree is backed up by all the evidence I can muster. It is most impressive.

Genealogical Table Showing the Descendants of John Ommanney
Produced by Henry Mortlock Ommanney, 1929

John Ommanney was Cornthwaite’s great-grandfather. It seems though that every more recent Ommanney can be traced back to Cornthwaite rather than to his brothers or uncles.

Rev. Edward Aislabie Ommanney

The portrait below has recently been made available by the National Portrait Gallery.

A number of other Ommannies are in their collection but not yet digitised. These include Honoria Catherine Ommanney and three more shots of Francis Downes Ommanney. I don’t know what their timetable is but it looks like they are working their way through them. If they are doing it alphabetically, we might expect them very soon.

BA (1827) / MA (1831) Exeter College Oxford 

Deacon: 20 December 1829, London

Curate: 22 December 1829, Mortlake

Priest: 19 September 1830, Cantebury

Perpetual Curate: 14 December 1832, Mortlake

Later Prebendary of Wells Cathedral (1848) and Rural Dean of Chew Magna (1850).

On 15 July 1841 he married Anna Catherine de Hochepied Larpent (20 June 1819 – 14 December 1893) at Wandsworth.

Author of Plain Advice to Persons who have been Lately Confirmed by the Bishop (1863). His advice probably did not extend to family planning, as he had twelve children between 1842 and 1861.

Died 21 January 1884. An obituary was published in The Times on 24 January 1884

Mrs Nettleton's School: UPDATE

I have received a few helpful pointers following my previous post, most of all from Giles Colchester, a descendent of the Nettletons who knows more about the school than I expected to find out.

Courtesy of him, here are four picture of what Francis Ommanney called that "huge, red brick, hideous house and the level expanse of playing field that lay behind it":

It turns out that Mrs Nettleton's school at Stonefleet was destined to become Feltonfleet, which moved to Cobham, Surrey in 1917, to escape the airship bombs. It is still there. I ought to have known, as my brother-in-law was a pupil. It's funny how these things turn out. 

January 2019: a further update. For photographs of some of the Feltonfleet school sports teams from the 1908-1911 period, please see https://www.flickr.com/gp/sjm_1974/39eQu8