#2 Emlin Holland - A Name for All Time.

When I first started looking at the family tree, this was a name that jumped out at me. I love the name Emlin - it seems romantic and slightly other worldly. I have never known anyone named Emlin and one of my research goals was to look at where this name might have come into the family.

Emlin Holland was baptised on 3rd June 1800 in the parish church of Mickleton in Gloucestershire. Her parents were Thomas Kemble Holland and Mary Tomes (my 4 x great-grandparents). She was one of 10 children and fell right in the middle of the family.

In 1816, she married Cotterell Corbett a tanner, at Church Honeybourne. They settled at Lichfield in Staffordshire where, in 1822, they began their own family. Their first child, named Emlin for her mother, only lived a few days but between 1823 and 1829, another five children were born; the last being another Emlin Holland to carry on the name.

In 1830 Cotterell Corbett died in Lichfield and was buried back at Lower Quinton where his branch of the family originated from. How Emlin managed for the next few years I am not sure, but in 1835 she married again, this time to a distant relative of Cotterell's; a farmer by the name of George Sheaf. George was a son of Samuel Sheaf and Sarah Harbidge and the older brother of Charles Sheaf from last week's post.

Between 1836 and 1842 Emlin and George had four sons, William, George, John Holland and Samuel. Along with some of the children from Emlin's first marriage, the family lived and worked on a farm at Marlcliff, near Bidford on Avon.

In 1852, just before her death, this very early Ambrotype was made of Emlin. According to a distant family connection in England, in a letter to my Aunty Thea, it was taken in the front doorway of the farmhouse at Marlcliff. 

He says " one can just see her key ring, which we still have, with her name on it - Emeline Corbett - Lichfield"

And as for the name Emlin, I have traced it back through her family line to Emlin Winchester, born abt 1612 in Ascott-Under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire; the sister of our direct ancestor Anne Winchester. It appears in various spellings as Emlin, Emlyn, Emeline, Emmaline and survived in the family naming traditions for 400 years! 

Synchronicity!

When I first started researching several years ago, I got sidetracked onto a line that was only very indirectly associated with the family. I was interested in a man called Cotterell Corbett, who built the farmhouse that my grandmother Isabella grew up in. According to my mother, who has visited the house, Honeybourne Manor Farm House itself was built in 1831 (this is carved into the guttering). On the lintel of a door into the dining room is the following verse: "Fools build houses for wise men to live in - Thus runs the ancient proverb. This house was built by Cotterell, and now belongs to Robert." [The Robert mentioned would have been Robert Fletcher]

 The Cotterell Corbett of Honeybourne Manor Farm was a son of Michael Corbett and Rebecca Ashwin and was a second cousin several times removed of my Grandmother. I got a bit carried away and at one stage checked relationships and was getting things like "so and so is the uncle of the husband of the sister of......." Quite ridiculous really! I put it all aside and got back to more relevant research along the original Sheaf lines. Or so I thought....

Last weekend, after following up some more of the Fletcher/Smith family both Mum and I (who are in different states might I add) came up with John Smith marrying Muriel Corbett in Lower Quinton in 1708. Bells started to ring wildly and I searched through the data base and found that this was a marriage I already had discovered in the irrelevant Corbett line! Suddenly the woman who was the aunt of the cousin of the sister of the uncle blah blah blah was my 6 x great-grandmother! And the lesson from all this? If you do the research, keep it! Who knows how it might tie in.