You may have seen from my previous post that I am on a bit of a mission to untangle and re-assemble various branches of the Draper family that called Castle Donington home in the 18th and 19th centuries. It turns out that the town and surrounding area were a bit of a hot-bed of Protestant dissent and I'm struggling to find them in parish records. So, time for a delve into one of my favourite go-to resources - newspapers.
Earlier this year, I wrote about this wonderful treasure trove of genealogical information from an Irish point of view on my Irish Geneaography website. I also use newspapers a lot when researching mainland British ancestors.
I access them via my FindMyPast subscription so I generally use some combination of name and place to search and then use the filters to narrow down the results. However, one of my bug-bears is that when you ask for the results to be sorted by date it defaults to descending order, putting the most recent results first. So, in my search for an 1860's death, I was just about to sort again and ignore the result from 1923 at the top of the list when the little snippet of garbled OCR text displayed caught my attention. I'm so glad I decided to stop and read the whole article as it turned out to be wonderfully fascinating, hilarious, error-strewn yet packed with genealogical truths from decades before that were the key to connecting some Draper branches.
There was also an intriguing connection to my own ancestors. Read on...
Basically, it was the story of a response to an advert placed by an heir hunter in 1922 trying to trace claimants to the estate of one Thomas Draper, lace maker of Nottingham who had actually died in 1866. A great-nephew named Charles Draper had replied but said, sadly, he could not prove the connection as "the family were Baptists and no records were kept." Enter stage right 2 formidable old ladies of Castle Donington in the shape of Mrs Mary Sutton, 101, and Mrs. Priscilla Ward, 89. Their memories were still sharp and they provided sworn testimonies in front of a local magistrate (Mrs. Sutton could apparently reel off his ancestors too!) and Charles Draper pocketed £1000!
The actual newspaper report is quite lengthy and I've shared but a fraction of Mrs. Sutton's memories above. Sadly this section, whilst it makes for a cracking tale, cannot be true or at least it must refer to a completely different Thomas Draper (or the sub-editor was having a really bad day...) Mrs Sutton would have been a small child in the 1820's and Thomas Draper, lace maker of Nottingham, son of Samuel Draper, was born in 1812 (that Baptist record did survive.) So, it would have been a hell of a stretch for him to have fought Napoleon before he was born to say the least! Of course, I'm now adding hunting down a candidate for the frog-eating Thomas Draper of Castle Donington to my to-do list. I wonder too if any of those sworn statements survive as legal papers in the National Archives perhaps?