St Mary’s Church, Clymping

​When I decided to take early retirement and come back to England after 32 years living and working in Belgium, I toyed with several places to live. I wanted to be nearish the coast, my parents were living near Ely at the time so investigated Norfolk and Suffolk but decided that transport links weren’t going to be too good. I knew Chichester already and in the and plumped for a smallish village between Littlehampton and Bognor Regis, It had a regular bus route (I’m a wimpy driver and who on earth invented roundabouts?) along the coast, a couple of shops, a hairdresser and village hall as well as post office and surgery (and good broadband). I found a house and I settled down to continue my family history research.

More and more was coming on line in 2008 and I started to revisit people I had tentatively found but been unable to go further with. One was the first husband of Elizabeth Adams, my paternal great great grandmother.

I had found Charles Reed my ancestor already and had only recently managed to work out their marriage. I knew their places of birth from census returns but it had taken some serious cross matching with census returns, FreeBMD and GRO references to get the correct certificate for Charles Reed and an Elizabeth! I still remember that sense of satisfaction when I found it.

William Cheesman. St Mary’s Church, Clymping

She gave her birthplace as a different but close parish around the West Sussex/East Hampshire borders every time, he was from Chichester, but they married in London in 1857. It was my first second marriage certificate and there it was – Elizabeth Cheeseman formerly Adams – and it was the same surname of a visitor to the family.

Finding the marriage helped me find her location in the 1851 census. It was less than two miles from where I was sitting! She was with her mother-in-law, Martha; both widowed and they were listed as laundresses, hmm.

Now I knew that she had been married before, I found her first marriage in August 1850 very quickly but was unable to find her first husband’s death for a couple of years even with a short timeline of August 1850 to April 1851. There were several possible candidates but I left it alone for a while. Then the British Newspapers went online and I eventually found his death notice in a Hampshire paper. He had died in Portsea in the January and his body was to be buried in Climping. Climping churchyard is not far from me. The SFHG burial search confirmed that he was indeed buried there. I decided to visit the churchyard and found that not only was he buried there but his headstone is still there alongside that of his mother – Martha Cheesman nee Till, whose mother was born in .. .. the village where I live.

When looking up the references today for this article I found a reference to an Elizabeth Cheesman who was arrested for stealing four pairs of stockings in August 1851. She was sent for trial and was sentenced to 3 weeks hard labour for larceny, presumably in Portsmouth Borough Gaol which was the one in operation at that time. There were other Cheesman families in Portsmouth at the time so not necessarily “my” Elizabeth at all but this will give me something else to research.,

My investigations into the Cheesman family have also led me to some very enjoyable art workshops in LIttlehampton, but that is another story.