'George Thomas and Ethel May in Saskatoon', by Robert Hughes

George Thomas went to Canada in 1920 in the hope of a better life.

He had been a vacuum-cleaner salesman in Walsall in the West Midlands of England according to the 1911 UK census, and there are letters from the time when he was serving in the Army in India, (dated in the late 1890s).

He married Ethel May Morris in 1906, and their only known child was George Albert, born in 1915 in Coventry. Elsewhere on this blog is an account of George Albert's tragic participation in the Spanish Civil War: he was 'missing in action' on the memorial of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, which in the context of that war means he was killed.

Above is the obituary notice for Ethel May Thomas, inserted in the Star Phoenix newspaper of Saskatoon by relatives or friends, which tells us that she died on February 16th 1971.

She had been a matron at the YMCA for 37 years until her retirement in 1958, which means she took the post very soon after arriving in Canada. They had first gone to Wolseley, Saskatchewan, to join George's brother Frank, and it could even have been Ethel May's appointment which took them into the big town of Saskatoon.

Ethel May Morris was born at Holt, Wiltshire. Her father was born at Farleigh Hungerford, and at her birth he was a gardener on a large estate in the area. Ethel May started her working life as a housemaid, (1901 census), and later went to work in the Midlands where she met and married Samuel Thomas, who was by that time universally known as George, (but not on his marriage certificate of course). Samuel bore the name of his father (Samuel Thomas 1835-1912), and grandfather (Samuel Thomas 1807-1878); so it is easy to imagine why, for the sake of simplicity, he was accorded a different forename! 'George' was so fashionable then anyway: students of the Thomas family tree will see that Lilas Thomas (c.1868-1949) married a William Warwick, but he also preferred to be called George!

George Thomas predeceased Ethel May and died on 18th February 1946, when he would have been 73: a respectable age but not approaching that of his siblings Irza, who died at 92; Francis (Frank), who is said to have died at over 90 although this is as yet unconfirmed; Rosa (later known as Rose) who made it to 93 albeit having had 57 years in mental hospitals; Florence who died at 92; and Newton who died just nine days short of his 92nd birthday.

Many another woman would have crumpled under the weight of the loss of her husband and her only son, but Ethel May continued to work as Matron of the YMCA for twelve more years, and even after retirement she was active in fund-raising, bowling, and as a member of St John's Cathedral in the city.

She and George are buried in grave 99-L108-N1/2 in Saskatoon's Woodlawn Cemetery.

"Sam the Boulevardier!" by Robert Hughes

Seen from the rampart of the Arc de Triomphe, Boulogne-Billancourt appears a seamless appendage of Paris, seeping into its loop of the Seine as a well-digested meal into a medical student's night out.

On ground level, this proud township is far from eaten: since at least before the time of my great-great-grandfather Samuel Thomas, it has retained its own identity...

Today, a trip on Metro 'Ligne 9' will take you to Marcel Sembat, where a sign conveniently points you to 'Centre Ville': not however the centre of 'Gay Paree', but the admin area of the municipality, just about 300 metres up the road.

Sam Thomas (Junior) was either a 'remittance man', a 'rep', or both; but definitely the grandfather of Lionel Britton the famous, if eccentric, writer of 'Hunger and Love'.

Sam may have been a bit of a reprobate, or rather a saintly figure in contrast to his old Gradgrind of a factory-owning father; but these five new records from his time in Billancourt can hardly help but contribute to our understanding of his (and our!) family.

Samuel, and for that matter Marie, are described as 'Rentiers'. This term quite clearly defines someone living on a private income, and is surprising given our previous assumption that Samuel was in Paris actively promoting his father's business. In such a case, the appropriate term would surely have been something like 'commercant', 'negociant', etc. Eugene Bédé, who was in Redditch at the time of the 1871 census in Samuel Thomas' household, (and we may reasonably assume a fellow fugitive of the Franco-Prussian War with Samuel and family), was one of the witnesses at the registration of the birth of Henri Thomas in 1869, and for him the term 'negociant' was not apparently too shameful.

We had not previously found a marriage record for Sam and Marie, but it is stated on the birth record of Frank that his parents were married in 1870, in Jersey. So at least three of the children, (including Irza my great-grandmother), were born out of wedlock!

There seems to be a Jersey motif running through the family: Ernest Augustus was on that island for a long time, and Irza made a brief (and presumed disastrous) second marriage to Frank LeBreton, almost certainly himself from Jersey.

From the point of view of Samuel Thomas Senior, could it not have seemed that his eldest son was cheerfully fathering kids with his exotic Belgian fancy-woman, and sending him the bill? There is speculation that Sam Senior was an atheist at heart, and Frederick Charles Guillaume's scrawled tree mentions Jewish origins; whilst there must also have been Welsh forebears. Is it not likely that any mention of a convent, let alone some royal connection, would have been anathema to the old monster, as it seems he could have been an archetypal Victorian Radical?

For family legend has it that Marie-Antoinette married Samuel Thomas against the bitter hostility of her family, who considered him to be 'in trade' and therefore unworthy of her social status. They were said to be have been an aristocratic Flemish family and some kind of cousins of the King of the Belgians. She is said to have leapt over the wall of a convent and married him anyway.

Records obtained at the Hôtel de Ville of Boulogne-Billancourt, (with the kind assistance of a very helpful lady who operated the microfiche and interpreted the tiny script!):

Birth of Henri, (as Jean Henri): 25 Nov 1869, at Rue Napoleon No. 8.

Death of Rose, (born 1871 at Redditch, and not to be confused with Rosa born 1877): 17 Jul 1872, at Rue Nationale No. 17.

Birth of Samuel, (later known as George), 1 Jan 1873, at Rue d'Issy No. 1.

Birth of Ernest Augustus, 11 Oct 1874, at Rue Nationale 17.

Birth of Francis, 3 Jun 1876, at Rue Nationale 10.

Above is an extract from Frank's birth record, showing how Sam and Marie married in Jersey in 1870. Why have three children out of wedlock (with another on the way by the end of 1870), if it could only annoy old Sam Senior, who would possibly have left his eldest son Samuel a fortune if he had so wished? There is only one sensible answer: one or both of Samuel and Marie were already married and had no capacity to make an honest woman/man of each other! At the moment, we don't know (and I have tried to find out through Ancestry.co.uk and Familysearch.org) who was married; but it is a bit like astronomy.

My great-great-uncle Ernest Augustus Thomas (see above) had a book published about Cosmology, set in some schools as a textbook, (according to at least one source). There can be little doubt that Lionel Britton the wacky old writer about the 'Space/Time Continuum' drew heavily on his uncle's inspiration.

The scientists of the Enlightenment worked out the position of the planets, although I wouldn't know where to start! (Oh, and the Aztecs etc. managed it too). By calculation, someone figured out how to find the Planet Pluto, even though no-one had ever seen it even through a telescope.

OK, I don't know how they worked out that Pluto existed at all, let alone where it was; but what I can say is that it is very, very, likely that either Marie Goffin or Samuel Thomas were married before they repaired to Jersey and married each other!

Seen in this light, the story of the snobbish rejection of Samuel by Marie's family may still have been true but not the whole truth or even the principal reason: suppose she was already married and was packed off to a convent to avoid scandal? This is speculation of course, as would be the probable reasons for Samuel Thomas Jr to be in Paris as a kind of exile. If he were a remittance man rather than a hard-working rep. for his father's business, then why was he?

We might keep in mind a record from Ancestry.co.uk's Criminal Records collection (1791-1892). There is a long list of Samuel Thomases, but only one in Worcestershire in the whole period. On 26 July 1865 at Worcester Midsummer Sessions a Samuel Thomas was fined £5 for Assault. Now, this sum was so huge for the time that it would normally be applied to persons of substantial means. Could it be that this related in some way to another family legend about how Samuel Thomas meted out a beating to a young relative who had caused the death of a horse, leading to the lad going into the attic, taking a shotgun and killing himself? This record might have had nothing to do with the legend, which might have been apocryphal anyway; but suppose Samuel Jr. had witnessed an overuse of force by his father, or had himself gone over the top with someone, would not either case be a possible reason for him to go abroad with some assistance from his Dad?

Wolseley, Saskatchewan, and George Albert Thomas

Robert Hughes continues to excavate his past. He writes:

'Wolseley, in Canada's prairie province of Saskatchewan, had a population of something over a thousand in 1916, and was growing rapidly as migrants flooded into the West: two of them my great-great-uncles George and Frank Thomas.

Frank Thomas, born in 1876, arrived in Canada with his wife and two boys in 1911, and by 1916 was established in Wolseley working as a nurseryman in forestry.

George Thomas was officially Samuel, like his father and grandfather, but presumably things had become too complicated when his father could not shake off the "Sam Thomas Junior" handle, and so this young fellow became George.

By 6th March 1920, when he arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick, on the ship "Scandinavian", he was no longer Samuel but also no longer young; proposing to make a new life farming in Saskatchewan at nearly 48 years of age.

In 1906 he had married Ethel May Morris, who had been brought up near Frome in East Somerset, the daughter of a gardener on a large estate; and who was later known by the family as Aunty May.

Ethel May followed her husband across the Atlantic a month later, landing at Halifax, Nova Scotia from the 'Carmania' on 5th April 1920. With her was a five-year old boy called George.

We had thought that there may well have been no children of the marriage between George and Ethel May, but we were wrong: this child turns out to have been George Albert Thomas born Coventry, Warwickshire, on 25th Feb 1915, their son.

My cousin David Guillaume now remembers an occasion, soon after the Second World War, when Aunty May was showing some photographs to his Aunt Louise at her flat in Alcester. He remembers the expression: “he was already in the air force when the war started”.

This was very likely to have been George Albert Thomas, and as I can find no record of him being a casualty, he is quite likely to have survived the war, although that is not certain, and we all know how high was the attrition rate among airmen.

Of Frank Thomas' sons, we know what happened to Cecil, (born 1905): he had no children of his own, but adopted Jason in 1964; eventually dying aged around ninety.

Samuel Francis Thomas, already known as Frank by the 1916 census of Saskatchewan, and born Upper Ipsley, Worcestershire, on 10th Nov 1900, was said to have married the daughter of a pig-farmer, but we do not know if there were any children.

So if we have Canadian cousins out there, descended from either Frank, (Samuel Francis), or George Albert, we would love to hear from you!'