Alfred Dolamore (1835-1910) and Elizabeth Dolamore (1836-1904).
My 2nd great-grand uncle and aunt.
Alfred Dolamore was baptised on 15 February 1835 in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, to parents David Dolamore and Mary Ann Walker. He was brought up in and around nearby Leavesden.
He was working as an agricultural labourer at the time of the 1851 census but he later followed his father and others in the wider family in becoming a carpenter. He married Elizabeth on 11 October 1856 at All Saints Church in Leavesden, the parish given as the location of her birth in various census returns. The marriage record lists her as Elizabeth Dollamore, so was she a cousin? Alfred’s father David had a brother called James, and his daughter Elizabeth’s birth year matches Alfred’s wife’s age. However, on the marriage record her father’s name is not given, suggesting she may have been illegitimate. I doubt the recording of her surname is a transcription error as she signed her name as “Elizabeth Dollamore” and there is a witness “Thomas Dollamore”, potentially one of her brothers born in 1829. So they probably were cousins…
The family lived locally for several years, with the census of 1871 recording them at Butchers Yard in Watford with their children. By the 1881 census they’d moved to Backwalls North in Stafford, where Alfred continued to work as a carpenter.
Elizabeth died in 1904 and Alfred followed in 1910 in tragic circumstances. The Staffordshire Advertiser of 19 February reported, under the title ‘Sequel to a workhouse inmate’s disappearance’, that Alfred’s body had been found floating in the River Sow at St Thomas’s Mill, Stafford, on the 18th by a Thomas Parsons. An examination showed that his throat had been cut slightly and a small knife was found in one of his pockets.
It was reported that Alfred had left Stafford Workhouse on a day’s leave on 10 January to visit his daughter Amelia Cotterill in Rowley Grove, but that he had then disappeared. A stick and cap was found the following day on the river bank close to the Corporation Sanitary Depot but the police had been unable to recover any body during several days of dragging the river.
Amelia told the inquest held at the Unicorn Inn in Stafford that her father had been unsettled in his mind and concerned about his health during his visit. But the workhouse master, a Mr Dix, said that he had been well behaved and quiet, and had not complained of having any cause for worry. The jury returned a verdict of suicide during a period of temporary insanity.
Elizabeth and Alfred’s children were:
- Elizabeth Dolamore (1858-1934). Born in Leavesden and baptised in 1859, Elizabeth married Matthew Goodman in Stafford in 1861. He was born in the city and worked in the boot-making industry in his younger years. The couple moved with their family to Leicester early in the 20th century, where Matthew began working with offenders in what would later be called the probation service. He died in 1942, eight years after his wife, and both were buried in Leicester.
- Emily Dolamore (1860-1917). Born in Leavesden, Emily worked in the shoe industry in Stafford. She married Worcestershire-born Joseph Coldicott in Birmingham in 1888 and settled there, raising a family. He worked as a labourer. She died in 1917.
- Flora Dolamore (1862-1917). Born in Leavesden but brought up in Stafford, Flora had a mental illness and was classed (horrendously) as an imbecile at the 1901 census and was living in the Stafford Union workhouse. A record from 1905 showed her being admitted to the county asylum, where she died in 1906.
- Alfred David Dolamore (1864-????). Born in Leavesden, Alfred worked as a maker in the shoe industry and was still living with his parents in Staffordshire in 1901 as a single man. In 1911 he was lodging at a house back near his birth place, at Watford in Hertfordshire but after that I can’t find him.
- Ellen Dolamore (1868-1911). Ellen was born in Leavesden and sometimes went by the name Eleanor/Elinor in the records. Like her sister Flora, she was ruthlessly classified as an imbecile at the 1901 census and was living in the Stafford Union workhouse. She died in 1911.
- Amelia Dolamore (1870-????). Amelia grew up in Stafford and married local man John Cotterill in the city in 1906. He worked as a postman. I’ve not been able to trace them after the 1911 census, where they were living in Rowley Grove.
- William Dolamore (1874-1893).
- Edward Dolamore (1875-1895).
- Henry Robert Dolamore (1877-1960). Born in Stafford, Henry joined the Royal Navy and toiled as a stoker in the navy. The 1921 census shows him on HMS Westminster, a torpedo boat destroyer, based at Harwich in Essex. He later moved to Derby and worked as machine shop labourer. The Derby Daily Telegraph of 23 September 1952 reported that he’d been arrested on the grounds that he had tried to commit suicide at Sandiacre by jumping into the canal. He died in the city eight years later. I’ve found no evidence of a marriage.
Sources: Hertfordshire County Archives (many are online). BMDs, census and other information from Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk. British Newspaper Archive – titles referred to in the text.