Day Twenty Nine

Tonight I went on the hunt for information about Fitzmaurice Creighton, my great grandfather.  I discovered a United Kingdom Census record on Ancestry.com showing that in 1901 he is living in All Saints Hampshire, with his second wife Hilda.   But where is All Saints, Hampshire ? It is not a town that I could find.  However there is a church near Winchester of that name, not far from Kings Somborne where my grandfather John Henry David Creighton was Vicar.  That sounded promising, so I dived online again,  google searching.

I discovered that All Saints church is in the estate village of East Stratton. The East Stratton state is the property of the Baring family, one of the most influential banking families in the history of banking. I discovered that in 1901 the head of the Baring family was Thomas George Baring, Earl of Northcliffe.  And then came the "A-ha" moment, that now-familiar blast of cold air that comes barreling out the past and smacks you in the face when another moment of your own history reveals itself.  I saw that Baring's  daughter, Emma Jane,  had married Henry George Louis Crichton, younger brother of the fourth Earl of Erne, John Crichton.  And I had been told many years ago by my aunt in London that the fourth Earl of Erne was at that time supporting my grandfather and his family in a manner which a mere Vicar's stipend could never do.

But the exhilarating moment of revelation fractured into yet more questions and doubt.  What the hell was going on here as the Victorian era was drawing to a close, a new century was dawning and the old feudal order was about to fade forever.  Why was the Earl of Erne supporting my grandfather, the Vicar of King Somborne?  Why was my great-grandfather, a retired Colonel in the Royal Marines now in his late-sixties, living on the estate of the Earl of Erne's brother-in-law with his new young wife, still in her early twenties and with a daughter aged five.  And why did my grandfather, then in his forties, living only twenty miles from East Stratton have absolutely no idea of his father's young wife nor of the daughter she had born?   Will we ever know what was going on within the complexities of these lives, lives that I felt even more strongly now were still somehow bound together by those events in Ireland that had lead to Fitzmaurice Creighton's grandfather Abraham Creighton, the second Earl of Erne,  being locked away for forty years in Brooke House Asylum? Lives somehow bound together by those events that lead the Earls of Erne to change the spelling of the name from Creighton to Crichton? Events that had lead my grandfather to make his children swear never to return to Crom Castle, as his father had made him swear?