Antique Sampler-who was Edith Annie Wild?

Exciting news! I have recently acquired this 19th century cross stitch sampler (I found it in a local charity shop window) and am planning on re-framing it to display in my flat.

I did some googling on how best to conserve it and have ordered a new frame with acid-free and lignin-free mount card as well as a window mount to stop the sampler from touching the glazing. 

Whilst I was shopping online for the new frame I began to wonder about who Edith Annie Wild had been. What had her life been like, and how had her sampler ended up in a Charity Shop in Scarborough? I did some searching online and this is what I discovered...

I have created a google map to show were the places mentioned in this entry are located in relation to one another. You can hopefully click here for the link.

At first I thought this was a pretty fruitless endeavour, a quick google of the place name of Clifton showed me there were twenty-one places in England alone that could have been the Clifton mentioned, as well as a good 50ish other places from around the world (The US won with a whopping thirty-five!). I decided to try to focus on the Cliftons that appeared in the North of England and then widen my search, at first the Ancestry website turned up over 42,000 results, until I realised I was searching through all available records for the last two hundred odd years!

One of the easiest things to do would be to focus on the census data, as I had Edith's full name and (hopefully) the vague place name of were she was when censuses were taken. The censuses closest to the date on the sampler were 1891 and 1901. I used the date on the sampler to guess a vague date of birth of 1880 with a margin error of ten years, also, as the search engine kept insisting that the only Clifton worth dealing with was the one near Brighouse I left the place name out of the search and merely looked for 'Yorkshire' instead. This time there were only 794 results and about halfway down the first page was listed "Edith A Wild", and her Birthplace was Clifton, Yorkshire, England.

At first I got excited, then a little sceptical. Edith's residence was listed as 'Conisbrough'. This census data was taken in 1901 when Edith was four years old, could it be possible that her family had moved to Connisbrough and then moved back to Clifton? Had they simply been visiting? After all the old censuses would simply record everyone who was in a given house on a certain day. Was this even 'my' Edith Annie Wild? 

I decided to google Clifton, Connisbrough and was only offered the road of 'Clifton Hill' in the town of Conisbrough, however when I moved the map around a bit I found the village of Clifton just down the road (apparently the boundaries have moved and it's now more associated with Rotherham). I was now pretty convinced that this was the Edith who had stitched the sampler

The 1891 census page that Edith and her family appear on

Detail showing the Wild family's entry

Edith's Father William is shown to be a farmer. He is married to Annie Wild who was born in Kirkstall, Leeds which is famous for its 12th Century Abbey. Edith had two older sisters, Alice and Mary who were fifteen and eleven at the time off the census.

By the time of the next census in 1901 Edith is fourteen years old, this means that if the sampler is indeed hers she would have stitched it around the age of eleven. She is still in Clifton but only herself and her mother now live together. Her sisters have both presumably moved away (I later found them both working as servants, Alice in Woolley and Mary in Featherstone). Annie however is marked as a 'Widow' who is 'Living on own means', William having died in 1891 sometime between April and June shortly after the census was taken.

The 1901 Census Page

Detail Showing Edith and Annie's entry

The next time I found Edith was in 1911, She had moved, her mother having died in 1906 and was now living in Maltby, a mining village near Rotherham.

Maltby, Rotherham 1911

Her sister Alice,  now 35 years old, is listed as the head of the houshold. Both sisters are marked as 'Single' and 'living on their own account' (I took this to mean self-employed). The really exciting bit though is that Alice is listed as the Shopkeeper of a Drapery and Edith as a Dressmaker!

1911 cencus entry for Alice and Edith

Detail of the Census entry

 Their address is given simply as 'The Bon Marche, Maltby' as any googling I did just bought up the chain store which wasn't founded until 1982, I will have to see if I can pick up that thread another time.

The next thing the Ancestry website threw at me was Edith's entry in the Marriage registration index to a Frank Leigh in 1922. Frank is listed in the 1911 census at age 18 as living with his parents and siblings in the village of Eccelsfield on the other side of Rotherham. His employment is as a 'Pawnbroker's Assistant'.

The ancestry website then found me a family tree for the rest of her family that her descendants had put together (unfortunately they hadn't logged onto the site since 2017). Edith and Frank had three sons; Frank, William and David. David is listed as having married and had two daughters, though their identities are listed as 'Private'.

Edith died in Bridlinton (just a twenty minute drive from were I grew up) in 1936. It is not clear why she was on the coast, having lived (as far as I can tell) most of her life in West Yorkshire. Perhaps she was on holiday? Or maybe retired there for the sea air? I knew when I began this journey that Edith would have been long dead, however I couldn't help but feel a little sad at her passing. It is nice to know that I have an embroidery that she may have created.

Edit (24/11/19): My mum was in Bridlinton doing research into our family history and decided to see if they had any record of Edith in the local archives. She was able to find a death notice which states that Edith died at Oriel House on Forth-avenue (which is very close to the seafront). As her place of residence is an address in Maltby it seems very likely that she was on holiday at the time.