Who was Martha Colver?

In the summer of 2016, we found a beautiful ambrotype at a local car boot sale.  Exceptionally bright and very well preserved it shows an extremely elderly lady in all her best mid-Victorian finery.  The most exciting aspect of the photograph is on the back though. On the mount someone has annotated by hand “Martha Colver Aged 80 years” and beneath that, possibly in a different hand “Taken July 14 1859”.

So the little old lady who was seated in front of the camera when that plate was exposed, and whose bright little face still looks out at us today was born in about 1779, probably got married at around the time of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) and raised her family between then and the Battle of Waterloo (1815) when she would have been about 35.

The back of the frame and mount as found. The information on the back is as precious as the image

So often the people in ‘found’ ambrotypes and cartes de visite are anonymous.  Perhaps if the images are inscribed or annotated they are more likely to be preserved within the family, particularly with the recent intense interest in genealogy, and so less likely to fall into the hands of collectors.  With just those little titbits of information to go on – a name, and a date – I decided to see how much I could find out about Martha Colver.

As well as a date, the ambrotype also gave us a rough geographical location.  The cartouche on the mount is from a photographer called Atkinson’s, of 103 Devonshire Street, Sheffield.

The most useful resource for this kind of research is census data, which I accessed though a subscription to Ancestry.co.uk.   The earliest published census is that for 1841, although the data on it is fairly limited (just name, age, gender, occupation and place of birth).  Later censuses taken every ten years from 1851 onwards include ‘relationship to head of household’ which is the most useful detail for unraveling relationships.

As the annotation on Martha’s photograph indicates it was taken in 1859, and that she was already 80 years old, I decided to look for her on the 1851 census, making the working assumption that she lived somewhere in or around Sheffield.

Bingo!  There she was, on the first set of results, in Grimesthorpe, a village near Sheffield.  The census says that she was aged 70 and a widow, living with her 30 year old son Edward and two servants.  Edward Colver’s occupation is given as “Builder & Farmer of 32 acres employing one indoor labourer”. 

So perhaps Martha was not born in 1779.  If she was 70 in 1851 then she was born in 1781.   It’s likely that she didn’t know how old she was, or exactly when she’d been born.  Registration of births, marriages and deaths was only compulsory from 1837 and despite her photographed finery she may not have been well-to-do, or particularly well educated and she may not even have been literate.

I tried to find out some more about her.

On the 1841 census I found Martha immediately again.  She was living in Grimesthorpe, but this time with Robert Colver whose age is given as 65 years old.  Martha is shown as 55, which would make her date of birth 1786.  I think it is safe to assume that Robert is her husband, although this early census doesn't actually give us that information.  Robert's occupation is recorded as “Indp” which is census-shorthand for “independent” or “of independent means”.  In other words, Robert has a private income from savings or investments.  This doesn't necessarily mean that he is wealthy, but it does mean that he doesn't need to work.

We can probably assume that Robert's private wealth was reasonably substantial though, because in 1861 I found Martha again, still in Grimesthorpe, but now her occupation is given as “Fund Holder”, which again means that she has private wealth.  Mary Holmes, her unmarried grandaughter (29) is living with her, and Martha is now listed as 81 years old (b.1780), which ties in more closely with the inscription on the ambrotype.  Martha’s private wealth was not referred to on the 1851 census because it would have been assumed that she was supported by her son who was treated as Head of the Household.

There is no record of Martha on the 1871 census, which is not very surprising, whichever version of her age you believe.  A search of FreeBMD.org lists the death of a Martha Colver in the Sheffield area in the first quarter of 1862.  She would have been between and 76 and 82 years old.

note the wedding ring picked out by applying gold paint to the plate.

I wondered what happened to Martha's son Edward with whom she was living in 1851.  I found a record of his marriage towards the end of 1851, and in 1861 he was farming 110 acres in Butterthwaite, a small village now almost under the M1 on the outskirts of Sheffield.  Living with him were his wife Elizabeth, their 4 year old daughter Clara, two servants and an 18 year old called Robert Colver, described as Edward's nephew. 

I could now assume that Martha and her husband must have had at least three children – Edward, a daughter who was Mary Holmes's mother, and another son who was Robert Colver (junior)'s father.  I returned to the 1851 census to search for Robert at the age of 8, and found him with his family – father William, a mason and builder, mother Charlotte, five brothers and a servant – living at 10, Nags Head Yard in Sheffield.

I now had a basic family tree for Martha, and using one of the search facilities in Ancestry.co.uk which allow you to match your research with that of other people, I got the most astonishing breakthrough.  On a vast and detailed family tree where some diligent researcher has added copies of photographs, I suddenly found the familiar face of Martha Colver looking out at me again.  At first glance the image was identical to the ambrotype which had been on my desk throughout this search, and I wondered initially whether the other researcher had owned it at some point.  But then I realised that the images are not identical.  Martha's hands are positioned slightly differently, her head is at a very slightly different angle, and her shawl and sleeves are draped slightly differently.  So when she sat in Atkinson's studios in July 1859, at least two plates were made.

The version on Ancestry.co.uk. A grab of a jpg of a scan of a photograph of an ambrotype..

Thanks to that other researcher, what I now know is as follows.  The bright little fierce looking lady in the image was born Martha Swift, probably towards the end of 1779.   She became Robert Colver's second wife in February 1806 (four months after Trafalgar).  Between 1806 and 1813 Robert and Martha had six children – a daughter, Hannah, and five sons, William, Joseph, Robert, James (died in infancy) and Thomas.  Joseph died in 1816 (just 6 years old) and then a further son, Edward was born in 1820.

Both William and Edward seem to have traded as builders and masons, and there was a Colver’s Yard in Grimesthorpe which may have been connected with the family.

Robert Colver – the grandson of Martha who was living with his uncle Edward in 1861 - became a leading figure in Sheffield; head of the Cutlers Company, and a partner of the steel firm Jones & Colver.

Martha Colver is buried in the churchyard of St Mary's, Ecclesfield, just outside Sheffield and her grave seems to be marked, and extant.

The other researcher seems to have traced William Colver's line, so I'd like to think that the image on Ancestry.co.uk is of the ambrotype which he was given as Martha's eldest son.  Perhaps there were more than two plates – perhaps Martha presented one to each of her surviving children in 1859 (Hannah, William, Thomas and Edward).  Without a monumental amount more research, it is impossible to deduce to whom “our” image belonged or how it fetched up in a car-boot sale in Hampshire in 2016, but at least we now know a little more about Martha and her family.

Finally, as a footnote, what about Atkinson's, the photographers?  References to Atkinson's Atelier Photographie (“replete with every convenience”) can found on the internet.  Devonshire Street in Sheffield city centre still exists, but 103 cannot be identified (although it is very likely that the street has been renumbered since 1859). 

An internet source giving a list of Sheffield photographers and the trade directories in which they advertised suggests that Edward Atkinson operated from 103 Devonshire Street in 1864, and the 1861 census shows him living at 54 Cobden View Road with his wife Sarah, and their children.  He is described as a “Photographic Printer and Publisher”.