He may be the John Shurmer who was baptised in Withington, Gloucestershire in 1766. It seems possible that he moved to Quenington in Gloucestershire and married Elizabeth Kitchener in 1800. There are a couple of children born in Gloucestershire around this time in Quenington and Coberley with parents John and Elizbeth. They may then have moved to Latton in Wiltshire as a John and Elizabeth / Betty Shurmer had 7 children between 1802 and 1815.
The children of John and Elizabeth were William (baptised 1803), James (baptised 1806), Sarah (1808), Robert (1810), Thomas (1813), John (1814), and Joseph (1815). John died of dropsy on the 19th November 1839 at the age of 73 and his son William registered the death. William was described as a labourer on the certificate. His widow Elizabeth continued to live in Latton and was sharing a house with her son Robert but died shortly afterwards, (1st September 1842), of jaundice at the age of 67.
Ann had been baptised on 27th May 1810 in South Cerney church and, as there was no mention of consent of parents being mentioned in the parish register, this suggests that she was over 21 when she married and so would have been born before July 1808. They had six children, Kezia Herbert born in 1830, Emma in 1833, John born in 1835, Hester in 1839, Joseph born in 1842 and James who was born in 1845, about a year before his mother died. She died of consumption, (tuberculosis), on the 6th July 1846 and was 36, suggesting she was under age when she married William. Strangely the death certificate said 'father a labourer' in the occupation column, and her 16 year old daughter Kezia was the person to register the birth.
John and Joseph were born in Latton and it is possible that James was as well. William had married again by 1851 to Maria, (possibly Maria Bellenger in autumn 1847), who was born in 1825 in Latton. William and Maria had four children, George in 1849, Frederick in February 1851, Rosanna who was baptised on 17th June 1855 and Albert William in 1864. They lived in Gosditch Street, Latton in 1861 but after William's death on 23rd November 1863 Maria and her sons moved to Cirencester Road in Latton and they lived next to the toll house on the Wilts and Berks Canal, although the canal no longer exists. (Rosanna probably died before 1861).
Between 1871 and 1881 another move followed to 27 Cricklade Road, Latton and this house was next to Street Farm. Albert was making his living as an agricultural labourer and probably helping to support his mother, with whom he still lived and he continued to live with her until after 1891. Maria died before April 1892, probably in Latton.
He was baptised in Latton on the 10th June 1810 and in 1841 he, and his mother Elizbeth, were living in the same house as a farmer called Edward Cook and his wife Mary. He was probably still living with his mother when she died in 1842 and the following year he married Sabina Gardner from Down Ampney in early 1843, (thirty years before the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in the same village). She had just turned 21 by the time of the marriage.
They had nine children between the time of their marriage and 1859, who were George, (died in infancy), Sarah Ann, Rosella or Rosetta, Jesse, Emma, Charlotte, Fanny, Edith and Daniel.
In 1851 the family was living in Church Lane, Latton with Robert working on one of the local farms. During the next ten years they moved to High Street, Latton and were in the same street in 1871. Robert died on the 21st December 1872 and is buried in the churchyard. Sabina stayed on in Latton, moving to 1 Cricklade Road and working for a farmer. She was still in Cricklade Road when the 1891 census was taken, living on her own in 4 rooms, and an unemployed charwoman.
By the 1901 census she was living in Latton Street, Latton with two granddaughters - Maud L and Elizabeth C Lancaster who had been born in London. Their mother was Rosetta Elizabeth who had married William Lancaster in Kensington, London in 1884.
Sabina died on the 5th of April 1903 and is buried in Latton churchyard with her husband and daughter Rosetta Elizabeth is also commemorated on the gravestone.
Thomas probably met Caroline Redford some time during the 1840s in Broad Blunsdon, Wiltshire. She was a female servant from Longcott, Berkshire and working in Highworth in 1841, aged 15. By the time she was 25 she had two illegitimate children and then presumably she and Thomas lived together as there does not seem to be any record of a marriage. They had eight children between 1851 and 1865 with the first 5 born in Wiltshire and then about late 1860 moving to Lancashire, where they stayed until at least 1871.
John was baptised in the church of St John the Baptist in Latton on the 11th September 1814 and married Sarah Stephens, (who was probably the daughter of William Stephens and Ann Lewis), around the end of 1839. Curiously there are two entries for the marriage in the General Register Office indexes, one for the December quarter of 1839 and the other in the first quarter of 1840. Their first child was Rosanna who was baptised on the 18th October 1840 but may have been born in June 1840 as she was shown as 12 months old in the 1841 census.
In 1841 the family were in Eisey, a small village very close to Latton, and in addition to John, Sarah and Rosanna there were two others in the household, Mary Stephens who may have been a 4 year old niece of Sarah's, and Ann Stephens aged 50 who was probably Sarah's mother. In common with a large number of men in that area John was an agricultural labourer.
They had a further four children - William in 1842, Sarah in 1844, Henry in 1846 and finally Sarah Anne who was baptised at Eisey on the 14th June 1848. I have been told that the family emigrated to Australia in 1849 on the "James Gibb" and settled near the town of Goulburn in the Southern Highlands region of New South Wales. There are at least two descendants of John and Sarah still living in Australia.
Branch 1 - Descendants of William Shurmer
Branch 2 - Descendants of Robert Shurmer
