The full document copied here was kindly supplied by John Robinson, Regina, Canada – updated October 2018

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INTRODUCTION.

The descendants of Frederick and Anne Shorthouse are dispersed widely in the British Isles and include families in Australia, Botswana, Canada and France.  To the best of our knowledge, this branch of the “Shorthouse” family name has not been carried forward into today’s generations.  There is however a possibility that their grandson Arthur Shorthouse may have had children that we have been unable to trace.

For a large part of their lives, the family lived in Trimdon Colliery and Deaf Hill. Frederick and Anne are buried in a common grave in St Paul’s churchyard; two of their sons are listed among the dead on the World War I memorial tablet.

To provide the extended family with a picture of this family, we have combined our recollections, surviving documents, research, newspaper articles and photographs into this book. Similar stories have been written for the Kell and Robinson branches of the family.

Researching family history is an interesting challenge, using many resources. Prior to the Census (before 1841) most information is in parish records. From 1837 onwards the government kept official records of births, marriages and deaths (BMD).

The BMD indexes were used to find people and in some cases get copies of their BMD certificates. Visits were made to other areas of the country and archives checked for family members. Contact was also made with other people researching this family name and information exchanged.

This story started with great grandson Billy Robinson obtaining the Shorthouse family photograph album and an old tea tin containing the 1914/18 World War (WWI) era documents from the estate of his great aunt, Annie Shorthouse, when she died in 1977.

Billy an amateur historian started to look into the family history but did not get around to document his research before he died. He had visited Grampound, to research Anne’s birthplace, and was able to contribute some family photographs to Grampound’s documented history “The Book of Grampound with Creed” by Bane and Oliver. 

In parallel to Billy’s research, his brother Jim started to list all known family members on a spreadsheet and with a little verbal help from Billy compiled the basic information to start a family tree. Jim also started to make a record of family photographs by scanning them into a computer, including the Shorthouse album.

Another brother, John in Canada, converted Jim’s spreadsheet into a database and started to develop a family tree. John together with his younger brother Paul in Durham started a more extensive search of the archives expanding and documenting the family history.

On a trip to England in 2003, John was shown the old tea tin containing the WWI documents by Billy’s widow Peggy.  These mostly handwritten documents were scanned, transposed into text by John and are reproduced here in this document.

While we are still researching various branches of our family, we thought that the information gathered about Frederick and Anne Shorthouse was more or less complete and interesting enough to publish.

 

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