Annie Charlotte Findlay née Cosby
(7 Sep 1853 – 17 May 1920)

Almost all that was thought, within our immediate family, to be known about Annie Cosby is to be found in Alexander (Sandy) Waddell's rather perfunctory assertion that she had deserted her children, and was close kin of the Cosbys of Stradbally.

The first assertion is almost certainly untrue (but he made it in good faith), and the second was only partly true if at all – kin perhaps but close no; her forebears had lived in England (in London and the West Country) for centuries, as we shall see – and indeed the jury is still out as to whether there was ever a connection with Stradbally, as the mists of time have swirled irrevocably across the family footprints.

But the Cosby line has flourished to this day, as we shall also see. It has to be regretted that the families of both my paternal and maternal grandmothers (Findlay and Girling respectively) were excised from the collective memory. In both cases they were perhaps a little rough and ready – I'm guessing here – the sort you invite to the New Year's Eve party but hope devoutly they won't turn up. Well what fun that would have been – and it has to be said that fun has been in short supply over the past couple of generations on both sides.

Aunt Jane remarked, not long before she died, that my father Walter was taken, at the age of seven, to visit Annie, his grandmother, in 1920 – probably not long before she died. I get the feeling that there had been discreet contact between Hannah, his mother, and Annie, her mother, over the long years of separation apparently orchestrated by the Findlay elders.

But then all contact was lost – until now! Read on!

Let's look first at Annie's husband Charles' immediate family

And her immediate family. We see at once that the Cosbys of Dorset were a flourishing tribe, who would quite plausibly have been able to help support and maintain Annie and her children after Charles Findlay was imprisoned, stricken with tuberculosis, and died. I'm entirely unconvinced by the bland official story that she unilaterally abandoned her children. It smacks of Kremlin fabulations following the deaths of Russian dissidents. "Three bullets to the head? Yes, obvious suicide."

(note that the Pancras registration district of London, instituted on 1 Jul 1837, was renamed as St Pancras on 1 Jan 1902)

What is really rather striking on reading through these tables (apart from the plentiful supply of parental and sibling support potentially available to the newly-widowed Annie, as observed earlier) is that Charles' mother died within three weeks of his own death. Quite possibly she collapsed and died on hearing the news, or took to her bed and refused all nourishment, or maybe she'd been ill anyway. But the point is that perhaps this provided the emotional leverage necessary to detach the children from Annie and pass them over to their maiden aunt Jessie Smith Findlay^§.

And it must be said that Aunt Jessie did a brilliant job of bringing them up. I can't speak for Val as I scarcely knew her, but I can say that Hannah inspired more deeply-felt love and respect amongst all who knew her, than anyone else I can think of.

But we must give Nature her due as well as Nurture. Charles Findlay we already know to have been a thoroughly Good Egg. And so, I am sure, was Annie herself. We can trace something of her life through Census records in the first (sic) year of each new decade. The ages given are possibly "next birthday":

She supported her family, and herself, through difficult circumstances all the way through. I think she deserves both our sympathy and our admiration.

Thought for the day

As described elsewhere, Val and Hannah were both baptised as Anglicans on 30 Jun 1899 (whilst briefly resident in Hampstead), and the question is why? If it was suspected that their birth parents hadn't bothered to get this done, or perhaps not in a suitable context, why had their foster mother not got round to it either? In an age which took ceremonial very seriously, it was a very odd omission.

My current thinking (Jan 2022) is that Aunt Jessie would have had them baptised at the Callander United Presbyterian Church (as it was probably known at that time). It would be very interesting to check the baptismal records of the Callander Church of Scotland for 1883/84.

The Rude Forefathers

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We can work our way upwards six generations via the Owen family tree (from Thomas Robert Cosby) and Herring family tree (from Jessie Frances Hannah Waddell) as displayed on the ancestry.co.uk website.

As to discrepant dates, I did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument, but then awaited more convincing evidence.

The Cosbys of the Stuart era, Londoners all, could conceivably be descended from the Cosbys of Tudor times in Stradbally, as most of Alexander and Dorcas Cosby's children seem to have been born in England (Oxford and Salisbury), but Arnold Cosby (b 1591) is the only plausible progenitor.

Or they could have been descended directly from the Cosbys of Leicestershire or Nottinghamshire, but there is (from what little I've seen) no documented candidate on that side either.

So, hoots toots, perhaps the whole thing is a mare's nest of unsubstantiated hearsay or wishful thinking – plus of course the unhelpful disinclination of the older generation to discuss the Cosby connection at all. I never heard any whisper of it from The Aunts, for example.

But never mind, there's a perfectly good honest lineage to be found in an eye-poppingly sophisticated and well documented website that I've only just (Oct 2015) discovered which gives chapter and verse from John Cosby (b 1644) down, via Annie Cosby (b 1853) and Val Findlay (b 1881), to Edward Gueritz (b 1919). It corrects and amplifies the tabulation above, and provides a link to the fullest possible account of the life and times of Thomas Cosby (b 1706). These Cosbys were salt of the earth: bakers, blacksmiths, cobblers and the like – hard-scrabble tradesmen at best, impoverished inmates of the workhouse in hard times. And gradually, they won through – or enough of them did – to pass their surname down to today – hopefully I can soon make contact with Professor Arnaud Aurejac-Davis to close the loop.

Meanwhile, it is salutary to compare and contrast the London / West Country tabulations as per the ancestry.co.uk website and that which Professor Aurejac-Davis has compiled (surely Père Noël's petits assistants must have spent many summer vacations in the research team that assembled so much fascinatingly detailed information to such a rigorously academic standard).

This is not to belittle the ancestry.co.uk versions – they don't generally get to display their credentials, which may well also be impressive.

Please see below a selective extract from the Aurejac-Davis website of all known direct ancestors of Annie Cosby. The data highlighted in orange indicate significant differences (almost certainly improvements!) from my table derived from the Herring and Owen trees in ancestry.co.uk

(As an aside, this website does rather stumble as regards Annie's descendants, not surprisingly given the circumstances of her husband's death - and indeed that itself doesn't accord with what I thought I knew about him.)