Thorney, August 2021
I have been doing my family tree, concentrating on my paternal side. My grandmother, Rose, was an Emmett from Longridge in Lancashire. She was daughter of John Emmett and Alice Chapman. In a stroke of serandipity a DNA match with a man living in Canada, threw up clues to my Gran’s maternal family which I never knew. My great grandmother, Alice Chapman was daughter of John and Rose Anna Chapman, nee Sigee, of Thorney, Cambridgeshire. She married John Emmett in St Lawrence church, Longridge on 7 November 1877, aged 21, the same year that her father died. She is listed as a Servant, maybe at a local stately home. I have no idea how she came to move away from Thorney all the way to Lancashire.
But what the serendipitous DNA match opened up me was the ancestry of my great great grandmother Rose Anna Sigee. Thanks to Huguenot record keeping I was able to trace that line back to Issac Sigee my 10th generation ancestor born 1620 in France and maybe to his parents in Flanders in France, Jean and Jenne, born around 1590. Isaac married Susanne Masengarbe, also a Huguenot born in France in 1623. I have found other Hugeuenot surnames in my ancestry also such as Notteau, Paren and Bernard – so far.
Great great grandfather John Chapman, a shepherd by profession. and his wife Rose Anna lived earlier in Green Drove, pictured above, but there being no houses, except one, there now and later in 63 Wisbech Road, now renumbered as 56 and also pictured above – the middle house. Rose Anna, aged 87, was still living there with son John at the time of the 2011 census, John having deceased in 1877. I took a photo of a Sigee grave in Thorney Abbey graveyard, pictured above. It is of a William Siggee (there are variations of the surname spelling) and Amy Siggee, died 1888 and 1909. I have not yet managed to work out their position in my family tree – if they have one.
I had a 4 day holiday in Thorney exploring the locale and my ancestry, staying at the Dog in a Doublet hotel, pictured above. When I arrived, I was met my two ladies of the Thorney Heritage Society who very kindly let me look at the Thorney Museum which is currently being refurbished. While in the county I visited my oldest friend Geoff in Saffron Waldon and the cathedral at Ely, pictured above.
