Fanny Elizabeth (1833-1901)
Sarah (1838-1881)
Thomas Baker (1840-1863)
At the time of the 1841 Census, the Park family were living at Southend Farm, highlighted in yellow on the map below. Thomas leased the land shaded blue. Fanny and Mary were boarding at Elizabeth Parsons school on Nibley Street.
Thomas and Sarah were living with their mother and father, Thomas and Ann, their grandmother, Ann Park, William, their older brother, and their aunt Mary. Also in the household were four farm servants.
Thomas and Ann were cousins, and Ann Park senior was Thomas’ mother in law. She was the daughter of Thomas Baker, who originally owned the farm, then called Bakers Farm. An echo of this is that Thomas the younger’s middle name was Baker.
Thomas senior (the husband of Ann Baker) had left his estate in trust until his wife’s death, which happened in 1843. One of the trustees was his son in law, Thomas Park. The farm was sold in March 1844. The map shows, shaded in blue, the area that Thomas Park was farming at the time of the sale, with Southend Farm highlighted yellow. He also farmed 3 strip fields in the Lotts, in the centre of the map.
In his will, Thomas left the estate to his three daughters, Ann, Mary and Elizabeth. It seems that Mary and her future husband (they married the following year) James Clark bought part of the land, although the strip fields were sold to the Shearman family. In 1847, this was leased to Thomas Park, Mary’s nephew.
In the 1851 Census, Thomas and Ann were living on the High Street in Wickwar, where Thomas was employed as a pig butcher. Their youngest daughter, Amelia, had been born in Nibley 4 years previously.
In 1861, Fanny was living with her aunt Mary Clark, at what is now called Bakers Farm on Wotton Road, North Nibley. James, her uncle, died in 1866 and his widow Mary gave up the business the following year and sold the farming stock and equipment, living out her retirement in Wotton under Edge, where she died 4 decades later.
Fanny married in Gloucester in 1867, when she was 34, to William Heath, a farm bailiff. In ’71 the couple, now with a son, were living in Lower Hagley, Worcestershire. William was recorded as being a farm labourer. Ten years later, they had 2 children, William was again a farm bailiff, and they lived at Grafton Manor in Worcestershire. In 1891 they were in Aston Manor, just outside Birmingham. While William was still a farm bailiff, their son was a machinist and their daughter a laundress.
In 1901, Fanny was widowed, and living with her married daughter in Erdington. She died later that year, aged 68.
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Sarah Ann married Daniel Henry Philpott in 1857, in Wickwar, when she was 19. Daniel was recorded as being an organist, but in future records was recorded as being a basket and sieve maker. They had 6 children. In ’61, the family lived in Wickwar, and, ten years later they had moved to Wotton under Edge, living on Bradley Street. In ’81 Sarah (a needlewoman) was living with her children in Ragnall, an area of Wotton. She died on phthisis later that year, aged 43, and was buried in Wickwar.
In her will, her estate of £78 was left in trust to her son, Edward Philpott, for the benefit of her husband, a lunatic.
Daniel died in Gloucester Lunatic Asylum in 1899. He was admitted there in 1872.
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In 1851, Thomas Baker Park was living with his aunt and uncle, James and Mary Clarke, at Sapperton Farm. Ten years later, he was living with his parents in Wickwar, an working as an agricultural labourer. He died 2 years later, aged 23, and was buried in Wickwar churchyard.
The account of the accident that led to his death appeared in the Cheltenham Mercury on 11th July.
FRIGHTFUL ACCIDENT AT ARNOLD’S BREWERY WICKWAR – A shocking accident occurred about nine o’clock last evening to a workman in the employ of Messrs Arnold, at their large brewery at Wickwar. The man, named Thomas Baker Park, son of Mr Thomas Park, farmer, of Wickwar, was engaged in one of the higher floors of the new and lofty brewery recently erected there, when he suddenly fell a distance of forty or fifty feet, and was dashed to the ground with such violence as to crush both his thighs in a frightful manner, and fracture his skull. He was immediately picked up, bleeding and insensible, and a door having been procured, he was placed on some shavings and sacks and taken to the railway station, where, fortunately, a train was just about to start from Bristol. …no time was lost in conveying him to the Bristol General Hospital…where he was promptly attended by the hopuse-surgeons who found he was in a most dangerous state…. We were unable to learn the cause of the accident, but it is said that the unfortunate man was engaged in lifting coal from the lower part of the premises to the top floors and must have lost his footing and fallen through the aperture used for the ‘lift’. He is a stout, well built man, about 26 years of age, and a member of a respectable family of the neighbourhood
North Nibley One-Place-Study 