Jabez and Emma Organ

Jabez (1837-1903)

Emma (1834-1872)

Map courtesy of Geoff Gwilliam

At the time of the 1841 Census, Jabez and Emma lived on Frog Lane, in the cottage numbered 140a. Edmund, their father, was a shoemaker, and was married to Sarah, nee May. There were 3 brothers also in the household, Edmund, Henry, and David. All the children were baptised at St Martins Church, nearby.

Edmund owned the property, and the strip of garden across the road (number 140).

Edmund’s brother John lived in the house next door, at 146. Their sister, Ann Pick lived in a cottage next to Edmund, numbered 141.

The siblings had been left these properties by their father, John Pick, in his will of 1837. He had also owned two acres of land, called the Slades, near Pit Court, which he left divided between his other 3 daughters. John’s house had been described as ‘newly built’ in the will. I believe that John took the land from the roadside waste, and there is no evidence of them in the Sales Details of John Smyth’s Estate in 1798. No evidence now remains of the properties.

In 1851, Emma was a servant in the household of John Parsons in the village, while Jabez was living with his parents and his brother, Henry. Another daughter had been born to Edmund and Sarah in 1841.

At the time of the next Census, she was working as a servant in Birmingham, at 71 Great Hampton Street.

In 1866, she married Jacob Organ (another Organ from North Nibley, the son of Maurice Organ, and another shoemaker) in Birmingham. He had been an apprentice to Emma’s brother in 1861. The couple had 3 children before her death in 1872. Jacob remarried a year later.

Returning to Jabez, in 1861 he, also, was living in Great Hampton Street, at number 112. He had married Sarah Jane Wiley in 1859, at All Saints Church in the city.

Jabez can then be followed through the press as he seems to have led a tumultuous life.

In 1872, Elizabeth Palmer, one of Jabez’ employees, was charged with stealing from him, and sentenced to 3 months imprisonment.

Later that year, Jabez filed for bankruptcy, as reported in the Birmingham Post.

The next month, this appeared in the Gloucestershire Chronicle.

In 1875, this appeared in the Birmingham Mail.

followed by this, in the same paper

In 1878, Sarah Jane sued Jabez for divorce (the only divorce in the cohort) citing adultery and cruelty. The full details of the abuse are outlined in the divorce proceedings, available on Ancestry, but they make for sobering reading. Jabez deserted his wife from 1872. In 1877 he bought a prostitute to the house and insisted that Sarah provided a bed for them and, when she refused, bit her hand and tore her clothes.

In 1881 and 1891, Jabez was recorded as living with Elizabeth Bulmer, aged 34, from Birmingham. They had married in 1880. She died in 1899.

Jabez died, aged 63, in 1903, and was buried at St Martins, back in North Nibley. He had returned to the village and, in 1901, was a boarder with Ann and Sidney Wyatt on the Wotton Road.

Sarah remarried and outlived both of them, dying in 1915.