A family of 14

I suppose I should have expected this.
Once again the parents were born in the 1840s and their children at similar dates to the previous three extra large families. The parents are George Gidley and Eliza Vicary and  their children were all born in the Plymouth, Devon area, between 1869 and 1890.

1. Eliza Jane Gidley 1869 (married Thomas Baker)
2. Rosina Maud Gidley 1870 (not found after 1891)
3. Rhoda Gidley 1871-1876
4. Maria Georgina Gidley 1873 (married Arthur Ernest Dinham)
5. George William Henry Gidley 1875-1878
6. John Charles Henry Gidley 1878-1920s in USA)
7. William Samuel Gidley 1880-1882
8. Florence Mary Gidley 1882 (married Richard Frederick Higgins)
9. Emily Louisa M Gidley 1883 (married Edward Crabb)
10. Beatrice Louisa Gidley 1885 (married John Rowe)
11. Eva Eveline Gidley 1886 (married William James Hutchings)
12. George Joseph Victor Gidley 1888-1888
13. Ethel Maud Gidley 1890 (married Arthur John Burnell)

And final update, I hope:
14. Margaret Elsie Gidley 1891-1892.
This has to be the largest Gidley family.

HMS Agincourt

Father George Gidley was born in Buckfastleigh, Devon in 1842. His naval record begins in January 1858 when he enlisted in the Royal Navy, and the censuses show he progressed to becoming an Able Seaman. He was a Leading Seaman on HMS Agincourt, which was stranded on Pearl Rock, near Gibraltar, in 1871, and at the ensuing court martial gave evidence as the leadsman in the chains. By 1881 he was a naval pensioner and died in 1914. Eliza, his wife, died in 1900, presumably worn out with bringing up the children single-handed. I can't help thinking that the regular births of his children meant he can't have made too many round the world trips.

And yet another family of 13. Why are familes so large at this time?

This time it is the family of Thomas Gidley and Elizabeth Branch of Plymouth, married in 1866. The list of their children is as follows:
1. Jane Ann Gidley 1866-1870
2. William Thomas Gidley 1868-1900
3. Mary Jane Gidley 1870 (married Albert Edward Spencer)
4. John Henry Gidley 1872-1889
5. Kate Elizabeth Gidley 1875 (married Sydney Edwin Roberts)
6. Bessie Branch Gidley 1877 (married Sydney Charles Oliver)
7. James Ernest Gidley 1879-1895
8. Thomas Alfred Gidley 1882-1917
9. Frederick Gidley 1884-1917
10. Lilian Emma Gidley 1886 (married Sydney Pink)
11. Harold Gidley 1888-1961
12. Percy John Gidley 1890-1918
13. Edwin Gidley 1893-1949

It is noticeable that all at least survived to the age of four. And they are approximately the same ages as the parents and children of the other Gidley families of 13. Can increased fertility have been the result of better nutrition at this period? From the following article :
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2009 Mar; 6(3): 1235–1253
Clayton Paul, and Rowbotham, Judith
How the Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died
^{https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/}
[a small extract]
"In 1845 the notorious Corn Laws were finally repealed ushering in the era of cheap food for the urban masses...
Thanks to the [railways], producers were now supplying the urban markets with more, fresher and cheaper food than was previously possible. A survey of food availability in the 1860s through sources such as Henry Mayhew’s survey of the London poor shows very substantial quantities of affordable vegetables and fruits now pouring into the urban markets."

Spitalfields Market, London

I have blogged about this family before - see posts of June 2014 for the two brothers who fell in the First World War, Thomas Alfred and Frederick Gidley.
Father Thomas Gidley was born in Dean Prior, Devon in about 1845, but had moved to Plymouth with the rest of his family by 1849. His occupations were respectable lower middle class: clerk or foreman. He died in 1915 and his wife Elizabeth in 1923, leaving many descendants.

Another family of 13 children

I posted too soon.
Charles Edwin Gidley born 1846 in Limehouse, in the East End of London, and his first wife, Jessie Matilda Garland, born about 1848 in London, also had 13 children.
They are as follows:
1. Charles William Gidley 1869-1895
2. Walter Thomas Gidley 1870-1871
3. Jessie Lilian Gidley 1872 (married Robert Laidlaw)
4. Lucy Maud Gidley 1874-1884
5. Emma Elizabeth Gidley 1875-1876
6. George William Gidley 1877-1878
7. Augustus George Gidley 1879-1925
8. Sydney Herbert Gidley 1881-1917
9. Frederick Richard Edwin Gidley 1884-1865
10. Leonard James Arthur Gidley 1885-1954
11. Montague Henry Gidley 1887-1929
12. Horace Stanley Gidley 1888-1975
13. Louisa Alice Gidley 1890-1890

I have posted about this family before. See the blog entries of June 2014 for Sydney Herbert Gidley, and for February 2014 for Augustus George Gidley.
Sadly, only one year after the birth and death of their 13th child in Plumstead, Kent, Jessie and Charles Edwin were no longer living together. In the 1891 census Charles Edwin has re-crossed the Thames, back to his East End roots, and was described as an engine fitter, Woolwich Arsenal. He was living with his brother George, in West Ham. He  remained working as an engineer and only two years after this census his first child with his second wife, Eliza Anderson, his brother's stepdaughter, was born. There were six subsequent children, giving him 20 children in total, which must surely be a Gidley record.
Jessie Matilda Gidley, his first wife, remained on the south side of the Thames in Plumstead, where her four youngest children were living with her in 1891 at 77 Conway Road. She is not to be found in the 1901 census but her death was registered in Strood, Kent in 1907. She had probably been living with her only surviving daughter, Jessie Laidlaw, whose family were in Strood in the 1911 census.

A house in Conway Road, Plumstead

This left the way clear for her estranged husband to marry Eliza Anderson. He had gone through a church ceremony with her in 1905 in St John's, Hackney, before Jessie's death, knocking ten years off his age and calling himself a widower, but they were legally able to marry in the December quarter of 1907 in West Ham registration district. Charles died in 1935, and his second wife, Eliza, in 1943. Charles' surviving children have left many descendants.
He and Richard Gidley of the previous post about large families were 5th cousins once removed, so it is extremely unlikely they knew of each other.

Is this the largest Gidley family?

And by "largest family" I mean the number of children in one family by one mother.
I'm still working my way through the maiden names for births before 1911 in the GRO Registers for England & Wales. One long, long, list for the name Staines caught my eye. Emma Mary Gidley nee Staines, born in Deptford in about 1848, had no fewer than 13 children. None were multiple births, so Emma was bearing children for over 21 years.
The list is as follows:
1. Richard Abel Gidley 1869-1910
2. William Thomas Gidley 1871-1887
3. Arthur Gidley 1872-1872
4. Frank Gidley 1873-1874
5. Selina Gidley 1875 ( married Alfred Ernest Reynolds)
6. Jesse Gidley 1877-1878
7. Effie Gidley 1878-1879 (death registered as Euphemia Gidley)
8. Henry Gidley 1880-1937
9. John Gidley 1882-1882
10. Ada Gidley 1883 (married William Charles Wall)
11. George Gidley 1884-1885
12. Albert Gidley 1887-1887
13. William John Gidley 1891-1951

Nelson's Buildings (behind the tram)

Emma's husband was Richard Gidley, born in 1843 in Plymouth, Devon. His parents were Jesse Gidley and Mary Westington, who had moved from Egg Buckland in Devon to Plymouth, but died there in 1849 aged only 28, leaving a wife on parish relief and three children. But the two sons got themselves trades - Richard was a wheelwright - and in the 1860s Richard moved to Deptford, where he married Emma Mary Staines in Rotherhithe in 1868.
The family prospered in a minor way, as Richard branched out into coach building. They lived in several addresses in Greenwich and Deptford. By 1911 he is recorded as a coach builder, carriage & coach building, living at 22 Nelson Buildings, Thames St, Deptford. He died just after the end of the First World War. Emma does not seem to have been  worn out by the constant childbearing, and lived until the age of 81 in 1929, leaving many grandchildren, of whom it appears the oldest was born only three years after her youngest child. Emma was buried on 17 August 1929 in Greenwich Cemetery.
Leave a comment if you know of any larger (or as large) Gidley families with one mother.

A sad story from Victorian Manchester

The General Register Office has just released new indexes to Births and Deaths in England & Wales. These now include ages of death for deaths registered before 1866, and the mother's maiden name for births registered before 1911. So families with children who were born and died between the 10 yearly censuses, can now be updated.
One couple, Alfred and Sarah Jane (nee Worthington) Gidley, married in the rather grand sounding Manchester Cathedral in April 1872, I had assumed were childless. The reality was much sadder. Between 1872 and 1891 Sarah had no fewer than eight children. Only the oldest, Mary Ellen Gidley, made it beyond her first birthday, dying aged 2 in 1875. The subsequent children - Hannah Maria (named after Alfred's mother), Elizabeth Ellen, Alfred Albert, Selina (named after Alfred's sister), Thomas Herbert (after Alfred's father and a brother who had died aged 10), David and James William, were lucky if they survived to six months. It's impossible to say exactly how old they were, as births and deaths were only indexed every quarter. Alfred Gidley himself died in February 1892, aged only 43, and Sarah went on to have a child, William, by another man, the following year. This child, her ninth, also died aged only a few months. Sarah Gidley was not living at home with her husband in 1891 and reappears when she remarries - to William Threlfall in 1900. From then on she can't easily be traced in later censuses, but possibly dies in 1917. There is one mention of her admittance to Withington Workhouse for a few weeks in 1895, but no reason is given.

Ancoats, Manchester

Alfred and Sarah seem to have lived with Alfred's parents for much of their married life. They are certainly all together in Hazel Street, Hulme in 1881 and Alfred is still there, described as married, in 1891. He worked in the transport industry, as his family tended to, on the railways in 1881 and as a lorry man in 1891. From the only photo I have seen of Hazel Street on the internet, it looks no worse than many another row of Victorian terraced houses, but it's possible that poor housing or the poor air quality had something to do with the early deaths of the babies. Certainly in the 1840s Friedrich Engels was scathing in his comments on Manchester's working class housing. See http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/p-health/slums.htm
Walter Gidley, the brother next in age to Alfred, who married Elizabeth Ann Young in 1870, also lost six children (including a set of twins) at very early ages, but the remaining six of their twelve children did survive to adulthood to provide them with grandchildren. Walter was also in the transport industry, working as a carter or drayman, and the family lived in Ardwick.
Their father, Thomas Gidley, was born in the very different surroundings of South Brent in Devon in 1816, but his trade as a woolcomber took him to Bradford, Yorkshire, as a young man. After a few minor brushes with the law he took himself and his family to Manchester, where he was living by 1861, working as a carter.