True Family

The True Family lived for many generations in Wiltshire, England, until one of their ilk, one Henry True (1839 – 1910), decided to take his wife Ann White and move about 150 kilometres west to Maesteg, Wales. They had three sons and four daughters.

I can send you a copy of all of the historical information I have posted to date. The greatest depth is on the True family (your father's mother's mother's father's family - i.e. your great great grandfather) which I got from a second cousin in Wales who shares this ancestry with us. I am posting more material about them (e.g. pictures of Henry True's house - where Rose True was raised and John Cooke was a boarder when he met Rose - and the church where John and Rose got married, courtesy of Google street-view) and other ancestor's as I find it or think of it. I do plan to subscribe to Ancestry.com when I feel I will have the time to really dig in (for instance, I found the marriage certificate of John and Rose with a free trial search). Interesting stuff but very time consuming.

— Bill Currie, email to Michael Currie, 2 January 2015

Wiltshire origins

Before the move to Wales the family were Wiltshire people, clustered around the villages of Tisbury and Hindon, some eight kilometres apart in the south-west of the county. Both halves of the marriage that took the name to Wales came from that small area: Henry True was baptised at Tisbury in 1839, and Ann White was born at Hindon in 1843.

The Tisbury register shows a large family growing through the 1840s and 1850s, with children of Charles True and his wife Eliza baptised from 1839 to 1850 and a birth sequence running to eight children between 1839 and 1864. Their parents had married at Tisbury on 23 January 1838, the year before the baptisms begin. Literacy was limited: Ann's mother registered her birth with a mark rather than a signature, as did both parties to the True–Sanger marriage recorded in the same parish.

Woolland and the move west

Henry True and Ann White married at Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire, on 11 July 1861. The couple then lived at Maun House, Woolland, where four of their children were born and where Henry worked as an under gardener — the first of the several trades he followed.

Research is always confusing! Henry was a jack of many trades, gardener florist and miner. A very clever man. His parents Charles and Elizabeth Sanger, m. Jan 23 1838 in Tisbury. Henry and Anne White m. July 11 1861 in Fonthill Gifford. They then lived in Maun House Wooland where 4 children were born, and he was an under gardener. Meeting the Cook family in South Parade he became involved in selling from his greenhouse and then in Maesteg market whilst working at Caer Defaid drift mine! What a man. Troedrhiwfer is not our old cottage — there are many many Troed (foot) rhiw (hill) places in Wales!

— Dan Griffiths, correspondence with Michael Currie

A family of the Llynfi valley

In Wales the family settled on South Parade, Maesteg, one of the terraces built after the Maesteg iron works opened in 1828, and stayed within a few doors of it for at least twenty years — at No. 8 through the 1891 and 1901 censuses, and at No. 5 by 1910. Other branches lived a short walk away on Harvey Street and Temple Street, so that for a generation most of the family lived within a few streets of one another.

Their working lives spanned both economies of the valley at once. Henry True was recorded across his life as a market gardener, a florist and, at 67, an ostler at the No. 9 Level Caedefaid drift mine, while his sons and sons-in-law went into the collieries — Coegnant, Caedefaid and the Maesteg Deep pit at Cwrt-y-Mwnws were all working within sight of the house. The market-gardening side of it began, by Dan Griffiths's account, after Henry met the Cook family on South Parade: he sold first from his own greenhouse and then at Maesteg market, all the while working at the drift mine. It was that mining economy that brought John Cooke to Maesteg from England, and so to the boarding room in Henry True's house where he met his future wife.

Henry's greenhouse stood next to Fonthill House, on the rising ground behind South Parade overlooking the old iron works. A 1962 photograph of the cleared works site, annotated by the family, marks the greenhouse and the house, and the spot at the side of Fonthill House where the wedding photograph of Rosetta True and John Cooke was taken. The house took its name from Fonthill Gifford, the Wiltshire parish where Henry and Ann had married in 1861. Fonthill House still stood in September 2008, under repair, with the site of an "old nursery" beside it; the family's former home at No. 8 South Parade still kept its long front garden.

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  Annie True (née White) and Henry True
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  Ordnance Survey map of Maesteg annotated by the family: South Parade and the Caedefaid No. 9 Level in green; the inset marks South Parade and the church at Llangynwyd
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  The Maesteg May Day Show, 1905
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  The Maesteg Iron Works site in 1962, South Parade behind, marked with the greenhouse, Fonthill House and the spot of the Cooke wedding photograph
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  Fonthill House, behind South Parade, under repair in 2008
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  Nos. 8 and 9 South Parade, 2008

Llangynwyd churchyard

Henry True and Ann True were buried in the churchyard of the parish church at Llangynwyd, the old village a few kilometres south of Maesteg: Ann in grave no. 11a 458, aged 63, and Henry in grave no. 11a 427, aged 70. In 2013 three of Henry and Ann's great-grandsons — the brothers Dan and Ronald Griffiths and their second cousin Ron Currie from Canada — visited the site, where both gravestones had become covered over with grass.

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  Llangynwyd about 1910, with the church in its walled graveyard
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  The True graves at Llangynwyd in 2013: Ronald Griffiths, Ron Currie and Dan Griffiths

Dispersal

Within two generations the family had scattered across three continents. Rose True and her husband left for Manitoba; her brother Albert George True went to Western Australia, dying at Wellington in 1956; and the Welsh line continued through Bessie True and her descendants, including the family genealogist Dan Griffiths, whose research underlies much of this article.

Legacy

One of those daughters, Bessie True (1872 - 1933), married a David Luther John Griffiths (1872 - 1942) at the register office in Bridgend on 28 March 1892, and had David Reese Griffiths (1913 - 1988), who was the father of noted family genealogist Dan Griffiths.

Another of those daughters, Rose True (1884 - 1961), was romanced by a boarder at her father's house, a man called John Cooke (1878-1950), who convinced her to make her way over to the Dominion of Canada. They settled in Manitoba and had five daughters and one son. One of those daughters, Edith Lucy Cooke (1918 - 2003) married a salesman called Jack Currie (1915 - 2009) and moved with him to Thunder Bay, Ontario and had three sons. The youngest of these sons was Ron Currie (1947 -), the father of Michael Currie.

Members

• Henry True (1839 – 1910) and Ann White (1843 – 1906)
• Rosetta Agnes True (1884 – 1961)
• Bessie Martha True (1872 – 1933)
• Alice Eliza True (1870 – 1955)

Open questions

Points where the surviving evidence does not settle the matter, recorded here so that later research has somewhere to start.

Two Tisbury marriage entries

The Tisbury register records a Charles True, labourer, marrying an Eliza Sanger at the parish church in 1858 — twenty years after the marriage date Dan Griffiths gives for Henry's parents, and impossible to reconcile with a baptism sequence that begins in 1839. The 1838 date fits the children; the 1858 entry most likely belongs to a different couple of the same names, common enough in one parish. Which of the two records the family's own marriage is not finally settled, and the given name of Henry's mother varies between the sources — Griffiths gives Elizabeth Sanger, the register Eliza Sanger.

Where was Maun House?

Griffiths gives the couple's home after their 1861 marriage as "Maun House Wooland", which this article renders as Maun House, Woolland. The place has not been identified with confidence. The obvious candidate is the village of Woolland in Dorset, which lies south-west of the Wiltshire villages the family came from, and an under gardener's post there would fit a small country estate; but that identification rests on a spelling alone, and it would place the couple outside Wiltshire before the move to Wales. No county is therefore asserted in the body of this article, and the house itself remains unlocated.

Burial dates at Llangynwyd

The family's note of the Llangynwyd graves dates Ann's burial to December 1906 and Henry's to June 1910, whereas the death certificates record their deaths on 4 November 1906 and 20 April 1910. A gap of six to eight weeks between death and burial would be unusual, so the burial months in the note may be misremembered or may record something other than the funeral; the burial register itself has not been checked.