The years passed, archives accumulated, and a few letters came along to overturn some of my certainties. As my research progressed, new documents added details, nuances and sometimes even changed the image I had built of my ancestor.
For a long time, Ellen remained a rather blurred silhouette to me. An English woman from good London society, someone my uncle Georges would occasionally mention, surrounded by family stories and unanswered questions.
Legend or reality?!!
With all the discoveries made over the years, the portrait I had created of Ellen gradually changed. It now seems time to revisit her story.
I will not repeat everything I have already written in previous chronicles where she appears. At the end of this text, I will leave links for anyone who wishes to rediscover them. As I researched members of her family, I uncovered other fragments of her life which, piece by piece, drew the picture of someone quite different from the woman I had once imagined.
Ellen was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1840. Her father was an English military officer and her mother was the daughter of a doctor established in Jamaica. Her grandparents had also lived in Jamaica, where they owned plantations. After the abolition of slavery, they returned to the Old World, first to Boulogne-sur-Mer and later to England.
Her mother, Maria Roe, remarried in 1851 and the family returned to France. Ellen was twelve and then fifteen years old when Maria and Jules Charlesson were born. She later returned to England in 1859, probably for a marriage arranged by her family.
Ellen was a wealthy heiress and this is where my research played a little trick on me.
According to The Times and Harper, she had supposedly been swept away by a merchant navy captain named Patrick Beckett Bellew, a man presented as rather questionable.
— Ah! I can sense a scandal coming, Catherine!
— Don’t make fun of me, Watson. At the time, I was already beginning to imagine a whole story.
— I know you. You must already have been filling pages and pages.
He was not entirely wrong.
In my mind, Ellen was becoming almost a heroine from a novel: a young English heiress charmed by a man with a doubtful reputation.
Then the research continued.
After having these texts translated, I realized my mistake. They were not ordinary newspaper articles at all, but a satirical publication that spared no one.
— You see, Catherine, archives sometimes have a sense of humour.
— Especially when they put me back in my place.
Patrick was not the only target, since his brother Francis, a caricaturist living in America, was also treated rather harshly.
Ellen had two children from this marriage: Francis and Maud.
Patrick died at sea in 1869.
The following year, she married my great-grandfather Georges Henri Le Petit.
For love? I believed that for a long time.
— Ah! You’re starting again, Catherine!
— Yes Watson, I know…
I was not sitting in their living room, nor did I witness their exchanged glances.
But some details still leave me wondering.
Shortly after their marriage, they left for America. My grandfather Georges William was born in New York in 1871. Georges Henri tried to establish his own business there.
They returned to France the following year.
Failure? Homesickness? A desire to return to their relatives?
I do not know.
— You really dislike unanswered questions.
— That’s the problem with genealogy, Watson. The more doors we open, the more corridors we discover.
The years passed and the couple settled in Calais. Georges Henri tried to make a living from his decorative painting business.
I mainly saw a couple struggling to keep their heads above water.
— You worry a lot about them, Catherine.
— Perhaps, Watson.
Whenever I search for someone in the archives, I always end up becoming a little attached.
Ellen inherited from her paternal aunts who had no children and later from a cousin who died without heirs.
These inheritances probably allowed the couple to breathe a little for a while.
But I have always had the feeling that success never truly came their way.
To supplement the family’s income, Ellen worked as a tullière.
— A wealthy heiress who worked?
— That is exactly what surprised me, Watson.
The image I had built in my mind was beginning to crack.
I had imagined her surrounded by comfort, almost protected from financial difficulties.
Little by little another Ellen emerged. A working woman. A wife. A mother.
A woman who, like so many others of her time, probably did what she could with what she had.
Georges Henri died in 1904 at the age of fifty-seven.
I found myself wondering what had become of Ellen afterwards.
Did she live with her children? Was she alone? Did she remain in Calais?
Archives sometimes answer questions and sometimes remain silent.
Ellen joined him five years later, in 1909.
Their children refused the inheritance, probably because it carried debts.
She was born in 1840. Her son Georges William, my grandfather, in 1871. Catherine’s mother in 1937. And she in 1957.
MyHer grandfather was sixty-six years old when his daughter was born.
— Catherine, at the beginning you had an English woman surrounded by legends… now you have Ellen.
I smile.
I think he is right.
A rebrousse temps généalogie 