In which we tackle the family of Mary Freeman (1781-1859), youngest child of John Freeman and Ann Backler and her wealthy husband Richard Pack (1738-1868). – a quick summary of the Pack line and of two of the families descended from Richard and Mary, with a preponderance of Revs and Landed Proprietors!

Mary Freeman (1781-1859) was the youngest child of Ann Backler and John Freeman, and possibly the most-favourably-married. On 18 March 1802 she married Richard Pack (1768-1838) at Bridewell Chapel in the City of London. He was the son of Christopher Pack (1735-1789), of Lewis & Pack, Oil and Salt Merchants, and Ann Kirby (1730-1785) of Northampton and, rather fortuitously, sister to Richard Kirby (or Kerby), owner of Flore House in Northamptonshire (search it on Wikipedia). Richard left the property to his sister Mary in her lifetime, and then to his nephew, Richard Pack, who went on to become Sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1830. Richard Pack pre-deceased Mary in 1838. In 1841 she is found in Tunbridge Wells with her three surviving younger children, and living adjacent to the widowed Giles Miller, whose brief story we looked at above. Just at the moment I cannot find Mary in the 1851 Census. I think I have spied her there with family members but I could be wrong. In any case, she died in Somerset where her Shore family lived (see next post) in 1859. Presumably she had had to leave Flore on the death of her husband.

Richard and Mary had seven children, as can be seen above. For simplicity’s sake I will look in this post at the first three of these.

Ann Augusta Pack (1805-1837) married Giles Miller (1797-1853) of Goudhurst in Kent at Flore on 20 May 1830. Witnesses were Richard and Mary Pack. But tragedy was to strike this couple. They had one son, Edward Lewis Miller (1831-1846). A newspaper search on his name yields: ‘deeply lamented, being killed by a fall from the cliffs at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, Edward Lewis Miller, only child of G. Miller Esq., of Goudhurst, aged 15’.   His remains, and those of his parents, are interred in a vault in the churchyard of Goudhurst Church.

John Christopher Pack (1807-1879) inherited the Flore estate on his father’s death in 1838, but apparently never lived there. He is found in successive censuses in London as a Landed Proprietor, and died at Whatley House in Frome, Somerset, the home of his brother-in-law, John Henry Shore (see next Post, when it appears!). Flore House was sold at the time of John Christopher’s death.

Mary Pack (1810-1898) married Richard Barnadiston Yates (1801-1883) on 10 February 1835. Here life becomes quite complicated. We encounter two families with double-barreled names, two of Mary Pack’s three children marrying sibling cousins, and a grandchild marrying another cousin – maybe a second cousin? My head is spinning. The tree above shows the wider family of Mary Freeman and Richard Pack, showing the children and grandchildren of their daughter Mary. But the diagram below, starting with the Rev Richard William Yates and his wife Hester Barnardiston, is needed to show the various cousinly marriages and the second double-barreled name. Where to start? The surnames of relevance become Barnardiston Yates/Pack; Barnardiston Yates/Crowther, later to become Crowther-Beynon, and Barnardiston Yates/Towers.

Mary Pack (1810-1898) married Captain Richard Barnardiston Yates (1801-1883) in Churchover, Warwicks in 1835. He was the son of the Rev Richard William Yates (1761-1805), himself the son of Rev Richard Sutton Yates. The double name seems to have arisen from the Rev Richard William Yates’ marriage to Hester Barnardiston (1763-1843), only child of the Rev Dr John Barnardiston (1719-1778), master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Mary and Richard had three children, as can be seen above: Ellen Flora, Adeline Mary and Gertrude Ann. Careful scrutiny of the tree above shows that Hester Barnardiston Yates (1796-1866), sister of the above Richard, married Rev (yes, another one) Samuel Crowther (1802-1880). They had two children, Rev Samuel Bryan Crowther (later Crowther-Beynon) and Richard William Barnardiston Crowther-Beynon, whom we will consider below. The birth date for Hester above shows 1787, which on reflection was a bit old for the children. a parish record search just now shows that the 1787 Hester died a day after birth. Her namesake was born in 1796.

Oldest daughter of Mary Pack and Richard Barnardiston Yates, Ellen Flora Barnardiston Yates (1834-1922), married the widowed and much older Rev Frederick Hopkins in 1887, when she was about 50. He died in 1907, and she died in 1922, one of her executors was a Crowther-Beynon nephew (see below). Nothing more relevant to this story!

Second daughter Adeline Mary Barnardiston Yates (1837-1918) was baptised at Flore, though the family were then living in Derbyshire. She was the second wife, married in 1869, of her cousin, widowed Richard William Barnardiston Crowther-Beynon, Captain Royal Scots 1st Regiment of Foot, who, alas, died in March 1878 aboard the troopship ‘Crocodile’ off the coast of Aden. Their daughter, Hester Mary Crowther-Beynon was christened in August that year, but died in 1879. Subsequent censuses show Adeline living in Worthing, Sussex, on private means with a small coterie of servants, until the 1911 Census finds her as a patient in the House of the Holy Road in Worthing, where she died in 1918. Available records do not show links with family, other than that her Will also cites as executor her nephew, Vernon Bryan Crowther-Beynon.

Gertrude Anne Barnardiston Yates (1838-1936), married in 1864 the older brother of the above Richard William, Rev. Samuel Bryan Crowther, M.A ., of Slines Oaks, who was Consular Chaplain at Christiana, Norway (later Oslo) from 1864-75, where their three children were born. Later on he would become Vicar of Lodsworth in Sussex, before ending his days in Beckenham, Kent. Although his father was the Rev Samuel Crowther, the name Beynon was the surname of Samuel’s maternal grandmother. For some reason it was the younger son (Richard William, above), who carried the name Crowther-Beynon. According to the Surrey Coats of Arms website, his older brother Rev Samuel Bryan, adopted the double-barreled name after Richard William’s death. So his and Gertrude Anne’s children came equipped with the Crowther-Beynon name in later life, though baptised just Crowther.

First up was Gunhilda Mary Crowther (1864-1887), who lived with her family after their return to England, until her marriage in January 1887 to William Towers Brown (1859-1887), her perhaps second cousin, son of Rev Joseph Thomas Brown, himself the son of Emma Towers, daughter of Emma Barnardiston Yates (1794-1867), sister of Richard Barnardiston Yates. But this churchly and cousinly marriage was to end in a very sad tragedy. At Easter time in April 1887, the couple set off on their wedding journey to Paris on the cross channel packet steamship Victoria. Early in the morning of 13 April, in dense fog, the steamship ran aground off the coast of Dieppe. There were some 90 passengers on board, and some 40 crew, but no record of the names of passengers. It subsequently transpired that as one of the lifeboats was lowered, it overturned, and among others, Gunhilda was cast adrift, whereupon her new husband flung himself into the water to rescue her. Both drowned, and their bodies were only recovered down the coast some six weeks later, identified by watches, rings and other articles on the bodies. A tragic funeral was held at Wokingham at the end of May, attended by very many clergy, members of Towers, Yates and Crowther-Beynon families and many more. What a sad story. I have not traced the fortunes of the three other Brown children.

Second child was Vernon Bryan Crowther aka Crowther-Beynon (1865-1941) He doesn’t feature hugely in this tale of Packs and Yates’s, so I will just say that he trained as a barrister-at-law, and was also a very well regarded antiquarian and numismatist, who can be searched online. His wife, Mary Giffard, was the daughter of another Rev – Frederick Walter Giffard.

Third child, Margaret Hester Crowther (1874-1912) appears to have lived her whole life with her parents. Just before her death in 1912, she is found with her widowed mother, Gertrude, in a 16-room house in Beckenham Kent, said to be ‘dependent on Head’. Was she infirm in some way? Her mother Gertrude died at the same address in December 1936, leaving some £42,000 in the care of her brother Vernon as Executor.

Having now completed our quick survey of the first three of Mary Freeman and Richard Pack’s children, we will leave them and turn our sights to the next post (coming very soon, I hope – it is snowing outside…) where we will look at their four younger children. Many more landed proprietors! Not sure about Revs.