ANCESTORS OF CHRISTOPHER FARR JUNIOR& ELIZABETH GILBERT
Roots in Linconshire Pt 4 - Christopher Farr & the Gilbert Family
This story is part 4 of my family line that lived in Lincolnshire until Christopher and Elizabeth (nee Gilbert) Farr migrated to Australia. Includes the stories of Elizabeth’s ancestors back to the late 1700s. I recommend you read part 1, part 2 and part 3 prior to reading this family story.
Settlement and Survival
Christopher Farr Junior: From Benington to Crisis (1800–1843)
Christopher Farr Junior, born in 1815, witnessed the last days of an ancient rural order. The enclosing of common land, once a slow transformation, was accelerating—enclosing fields, redefining labour, and undermining long-standing community rights. The Lincolnshire landscape Christopher knew was one of stark contrasts: the rolling chalk wolds to the west where sheep grazed, and the flat, dark fenlands to the east where drainage channels carved straight lines through soil that had once been marsh.
His home in Benington sat along the road between Boston and Spalding, in drained fertile fenland nourished by centuries of engineering. The land here was rich—so rich that farmers could grow wheat, barley, beans, and flax on soil reclaimed from the sea. Yet that fertility came at a cost. The fens required constant maintenance: dykes needed scouring, sluices needed tending, and the ever-present threat of flooding haunted every winter.
The cottage where Christopher grew up reflected modest improvements on the homes of his grandparents. Separate rooms for sleeping and working were becoming more common, and windows admitted bright light during short winter days. Life was a blend of old and new: his first wife Mary maintained traditional skills of brewing, preservation, and spinning, while the family embraced new commodities like sugar, tea, and printed textiles that arrived via Boston's bustling port.
 |
| Near Boston, Lincolnshire. 1800s |
Mary (née Johnson) Farr: The Heart That Held It All
Mary Johnson, the first wife of my 3rd great-grandfather, was born in Leake in 1809 and baptised in the parish church. She embodied the quiet resilience of the agricultural working class—women whose labour was as essential as any man's, yet whose names rarely appeared in records except at baptism, marriage, and burial.
Her mother, Ann Woodthorp, was born in Stixwould, a quiet agricultural village nestled among the fens. Ann married Daniel Johnson at Coningsby in Lincolnshire in August 1797. Coningsby was then transitioning from a quiet agricultural settlement on the edge of the fens into a busy trading hub. Located at a crossing of the River Bain, the village had grown around the medieval church of St Michael, whose tower served as a landmark for travellers crossing the flat fens. By the early nineteenth century, Coningsby's weekly market and annual fairs drew farmers and tradesmen from surrounding parishes, bringing news, goods, and opportunities that isolated villages lacked.
 |
| Stixwould railway operated until 1979 |
Ann passed down essential domestic knowledge to her daughter Mary—brewing, preserving food, nursing the sick, and navigating the intricate social ties that sustained rural life. These were not mere hobbies but survival skills. The women of the fens knew which herbs treated fever, how to stretch a joint of meat across a week of meals, and how to manage a household when the men were absent for harvest work or seasonal labour elsewhere.
Mary's early years would have been shaped by labour, learning, and the unyielding rhythms of fenland existence. She would have joined her mother in the fields at harvest, gleaning grain left behind by the reapers. She would have learned to spin wool into yarn, to brew small beer for a family's daily drink, and to nurse younger siblings through the fevers that swept through villages each winter.
When Mary entered adulthood unmarried and pregnant—a circumstance more common than Victorian sensibilities later acknowledged—she drew on her family's strength to forge a path toward respectability through marriage to Christopher Farr. Between 1832 and 1842, she bore several children while managing a household governed by the seasons, enduring losses too numerous to easily recount.
Her death came in the depths of winter, likely during a difficult childbirth, when the world outside was as unforgiving as the cold that crept through the cottage walls. She died in December 1843, aged thirty-four. Her passing tore apart the fragile fabric that had held the family together.
Mary's loss was more than emotional devastation; it was an immediate domestic crisis. Christopher, working long hours as a farm labourer, could not simultaneously earn their livelihood and perform the essential domestic labour that kept his sons alive. The boys needed tending, the cottage needed maintaining, and these were not luxuries but necessities of survival. Without Mary's hands to manage the endless cycle of cooking, cleaning, and caring, the household would have become a place shadowed by uncertainty and practical chaos.
Her absence left Christopher exposed, vulnerable to the tragedies that soon followed and desperately in need of someone to fill the domestic void Mary's death had created. Unfortunately, this void was filled by his cousin Elizabeth three weeks after Mary's death—and within months, his young sons were murdered. (See the separate stories about the poisoning trials for the full account of those events.)
Within weeks of the deaths of his two sons, Christopher Farr left Benington and travelled approximately eight miles to Gedney Dyke, a small village just a mile north of Gedney and four miles from the edge of the Wash. There, he stayed with his brother William and his family. It was in the shadow of that grief that he met his second wife, Elizabeth Gilbert.
The Gilbert–Wells Heritage: A Different Strand (1792–1845)
Two families, both marked by loss, came together on a winter day in January 1845. Christopher Farr, burdened by scandal and mourning, stood beside Elizabeth Gilbert, a young woman who had buried her father less than a year earlier. Their decision to begin again, to leave behind sorrow and rebuild, speaks to the strength they must have found in one another.
Elizabeth brought more to the marriage than Christopher could have foreseen. Behind her stood generations of women who had learned to endure and adapt, following a path shaped by different circumstances than those of the Farrs. To understand Elizabeth's story, we must look further back, to the lineage she carried with her.
Bourne: Market Town Advantage
Elizabeth's great-grandmother, Mary Parnham, came from Bourne, a market town that had thrived since Roman times. Unlike the isolated fenland villages where the Farrs laboured, Bourne was a place of connection and opportunity. The sound of coach horns would have been familiar in Bourne's streets as horses were changed at establishments like the Angel Hotel on the London-to-Lincoln route.
 |
| Bourne, Lincolneshire. 1875 |
Bourne's population grew significantly during this period—from 1,664 residents in 1801 to 3,717 by 1851, more than doubling in half a century. This growth reflected its role as a market and administrative centre serving a large rural area of south Lincolnshire, positioned between the larger towns of Grantham, Sleaford, Spalding, and Stamford.
News travelled through Bourne faster than through isolated fenland villages. Market days brought farmers from surrounding parishes, their carts loaded with produce and their pockets holding coins for traders who lined the market square. The town had a town hall, two banking offices, two chief inns, and was a seat of quarter and petty sessions—meaning that magistrates met there to administer justice. This was a world away from the agricultural hamlets where the Farrs lived.
Yet Mary Parnham's time was brief. She died in January 1800, buried on January 24 as "wife of John Wells," leaving behind a daughter, Catherine, who was barely five years old. Her early death deprived the family of her market town connections and maternal guidance, but Catherine had been born into a community with broader horizons than most rural children could expect.
John Wells: Adaptation and Remarriage
John Wells, widowed at twenty-nine with a young daughter, faced the challenge that confronted many rural men of his generation. His solution was swift and practical: on June 20, 1803, he married Mary Moore, also a widow, in Bourne.
This second marriage created a blended family that would have required careful navigation. Catherine Wells, now eight years old, gained a stepmother and the stability of a restored household. John's movement between parishes, his marriages, and his apparent success in maintaining his family's position all suggest a man who understood how to navigate the changing rural economy.
When John died in 1824 at Gosberton, he left behind a daughter who had absorbed lessons from both her birth mother's market town heritage and her stepmother's practical rural wisdom.
Catherine and Thomas Gilbert
Catherine Wells married Thomas Gilbert, bringing her dual inheritance of market town awareness and rural practicality to the union. Together they settled in Gedney, a fenland parish that blended agricultural labour with proximity to market networks. There, in 1826, Elizabeth was born and baptised, entering a world poised on the edge of transformation.
 |
| Gedney, Lincolnshire, |
Gedney Dyke, the hamlet where Elizabeth would later marry, was a small but established community. By 1836, a 68-foot-high red brick tower mill had been built there for grinding cereals—a symbol of the mechanisation that was transforming rural England. The mill worked until 1842, precisely the period when Elizabeth was growing up. She would have seen its sails turning against the flat fenland sky, a daily reminder that the old ways were giving way to the new.
Thomas Gilbert's work as a labourer placed the family firmly in the agricultural working class, yet Catherine's heritage meant Elizabeth grew up with knowledge that extended beyond the immediate parish. She would have understood that markets offered better prices than village shops, that towns held opportunities, and that connections mattered.
The 1840s Crisis: Two Worlds Collide
The winter of 1843-1844 brought together multiple catastrophes that would reshape rural Lincolnshire. Harvest failures echoed across Europe. The potato blight that would devastate Ireland also touched England. Wheat and rye harvests failed repeatedly between 1845 and 1847, driving bread prices to levels that consumed entire family incomes.
The winter of 1843-1844 was particularly brutal. Frost gripped the land well into March, so intense that farmers ploughed under wheat crops ruined by cold and planted oats instead. Livestock died from exposure and lack of fodder. Snow piled high across the lanes, isolating villages and halting all but essential travel.
Thomas Gilbert's death in December 1843 occurred within this broader context of community crisis. When Elizabeth's father died, leaving Catherine widowed at forty-eight, they joined thousands of rural families suddenly vulnerable to destitution. Elizabeth, barely seventeen years old, faced a future without her father's protection in an increasingly hostile environment.
A Union Forged for New Horizons
On 21 January 1845, within the solid stone sanctuary of St Mary Magdalene Church in Gedney, Christopher Farr married Elizabeth Gilbert. The church register recorded them both as illiterate, their marks standing in place of signatures—quiet symbols of their social standing. At thirty, Christopher faced the daunting task of rebuilding his life. Unmarried men, especially those shadowed by recent tragedy, often found themselves isolated from respectable society.
For Elizabeth, not yet nineteen, the marriage offered a way out of her own precarious circumstances. Her mother gave consent to the marriage, so it is likely that what she saw in Christopher was not respectability or security in the traditional sense, but something perhaps more valuable: determination. Here was a man who, despite everything, had not broken. A man willing to look forward rather than back, to seek opportunity rather than accept defeat. That quality—resilience in the face of loss—would become the foundation of their survival.
Heartbreak Compounded
The couple's early months together were marked by hope and devastating loss. Elizabeth became pregnant quickly, but on an October day in 1845, she laboured to bring their daughter Susan into the world, only to watch her die the same day she was born.
The grief must have been crushing. For Christopher, it was another child lost, another small body carried to the churchyard. For Elizabeth, barely twenty years old and married less than a year, it was her first experience of the maternal mortality that haunted rural women. In an era when even prosperous families lost a quarter of their children before adulthood, such losses were common—but no less piercing for being common.
Their second infant loss followed, compounding the heartbreak and testing the fragile foundation of their marriage. In these darkest moments, they might easily have turned away from each other, each wrapped in private grief. Instead, something remarkable happened: they found in one another a shared determination not to let tragedy have the final word.
The Decision to Emigrate
It was perhaps these losses, as much as Christopher's past, that drove their decision to emigrate. The exact moment they decided to leave England is lost to history. The parish records show them still in Gedney through 1846 and early 1847, but somewhere during those difficult years they made their choice.
South Australia offered assisted passage to agricultural labourers—free or heavily subsidised passage to a new world for families deemed suitable and willing to brave the perilous journey. These schemes were funded by land sales in the colony, a system designed to bring working-class families who would become the backbone of the colonial economy. The demand for labour in South Australia was so urgent by 1847 that colonists were raising funds to import workers from neighbouring colonies, with newspapers reporting that "herds and flocks stray untended, mines remain unworked, and farms lie untilled" for lack of labourers.
For Christopher and Elizabeth, the weight of recent tragedy and the economic uncertainty in Lincolnshire may have made the unknowns of Australia feel less daunting than the bleak familiarity of staying. The colony offered what England could not: affordable land, high wages, and the possibility of building a future unshadowed by past scandal.
When the opportunity arose, they seized it with the steely resolve of survivors who refused to surrender. On 21 December 1847, Christopher and Elizabeth boarded the David Malcolm at London docks. Elizabeth was heavily pregnant again, her condition visible to everyone who saw them embark. The decision to travel in such circumstances speaks to their shared determination. They could not wait. They would not delay. Together, they would leave England behind while they still had the courage and means to go.
The Heritage They Carried
Behind them lay everything: the limestone market towns where Elizabeth had grown up, the fenland parishes where Christopher's family had laboured for over a century, the churchyards holding too many small graves. Ahead lay the unknown. A colonial town called Kapunda awaited them, a copper-mining community taking shape in the Australian hills. Here was the possibility that they might finally build a family that would survive.
When Elizabeth Gilbert boarded that ship, she carried with her more than personal hope for a better future. She embodied generations of Lincolnshire survival strategies: the market town awareness of broader opportunities that came from her great-grandmother Mary Parnham, the agricultural knowledge of seasonal rhythms that sustained her grandmother Catherine, and most importantly, the female wisdom of adaptation and endurance that had sustained her maternal line through decades of rural transformation.
Christopher brought his own inheritance: generations of fenland resilience, the knowledge of drainage and seasons, the Farr family's hard-won legal settlement rights that had once meant security but now meant nothing. More than that, he brought the determination of a man who had lost everything and chosen to rebuild rather than break.
The Gilbert-Wells heritage represented a different strand of English rural experience from the pure agricultural labour that characterised the Farr family. Where the Farrs had deep roots in specific parishes and lived by the ancient rhythms of fenland agriculture, the Gilbert-Wells line had developed the flexibility and broader perspective that came from market town life and strategic marriage alliances.
Together, Elizabeth and Christopher combined these strengths. Her adaptability and his endurance. Her networks and his knowledge of the land. Her hope and his determination. This partnership would prove crucial in Australia, where the ability to recognise opportunity, build networks across social boundaries, and adapt quickly to new circumstances determined the difference between colonial failure and success.
The tragedy was that achieving this success required abandoning everything the previous generations had built. The market town connections, the parish networks, the cultural knowledge that had sustained both their family lines for generations had to be left behind for the promise of Australian opportunity. But in each other, they had found something the old world could not take away: a partnership forged in loss that had learned to hope again.
As I am first focusing on the families prior to coming to Australia, this is the last story on the Farr/Gilbert family. Next I will explore the Hancocks in Cornwall.
Sources
Parish registers of Benington (All Saints), Gedney (St Mary Magdalene), and Leake; Coningsby parish history and market records (British History Online); Bourne population data (Bourne Civic Society); Lincolnshire fenland agricultural history (Pawley, "Lincolnshire Farming"); South Australian emigration records (State Library of SA); South Australian Register, 1847 labour shortage reports; Gedney Dyke mill history (Lincolnshire Mills Group); General history of Coningsby (GENUKI).Sources & Further Reading
The stories on the murder of his two sons.
No comments:
Post a Comment