SAUL Co-ordinator's Report December 2011

by John Slaughter

I am pleased to welcome three new members, Sarah Hopkins, Dorothy Pooley and Jackie Roberts.

Sarah Hopkins has joined on behalf of her partner Gavin Saul. I referred to the earlier correspondence that I had with Gavin in the previous journal (August 2011), so will not repeat the details here. However one piece of further information is worth mentioning concerning Gavin’s grandfather Percy Sidney Saul. It seems that he was sentenced to attend the Wellesley Nautical School in Blyth for the crime of “wandering”. He was found wandering in Scarborough and placed in the care of the navy school. The records of the School state that Percy had been transferred from TGH, which the archivist thinks may refer to The Greens Home. In later life Percy entered the Royal Navy and served as a submariner on a T-class submarine Trusty during WW2. Gavin and Sarah are attempting to find out more about Percy’s early life and why he was found “wandering”.

Dorothy Pooley is the second cousin of member Mary Boulton who has extensively researched the Sauls of Sibsey, Lincolnshire. Dorothy’s father was Philip Bycroft Saul who sadly died last year. Dorothy has a copy of a diary written between 1800 and 1834 by John Saul of Sibsey, who died in 1846. The diary contains letters from a number of people written as early as 1746 and interesting details of the purchase of church bells at Sibsey to which a number of Sauls subscribed. The contents of the diary would make an interesting article or series of articles for the journal and hope that this will appear in later journals.

Jackie Roberts is related to and in contact with member William Saul. William has provided a lot of information about four siblings of a George Saul all of whom appear to have been born in Ireland, possibly in or around Dublin. William wrote an article which was published in our August 2008 journal. On various certificates etc. the siblings were consistently named their father as George Saul and mother as Agnes Talbot. We have a chart that is headed by such
a couple who married at Tatham, Lancashire in 1801. This couple can not be the parents of the four siblings, not least because George died in 1817, but there is strong circumstantial evidence of a link. George and Agnes had six children baptised at Tatham between 1802 and 1814. Of these we have no evidence of what became of three, namely Robert (1802), Christopher (1809) and George (1812). One, if not all three, may have migrated to Ireland. The strong candidate for  the siblings father is George (1812). The likely scenario is that the siblings’ father died a few years prior to 1871, for on that years census we find a household at Bentham, Yorkshire headed by a Mary Saul, widow, aged 40 years and her two sons Robert (13) and George (7), who are two of the siblings. All the other Sauls resident at Bentham in 1871 are descendants of George and Agnes, so the coincidence is too great to ignore. The definitive answer to this puzzle must lie within Irish records.

Finally member Cecilia Bell has found a second Saul connection. She has recently discovered that a 4 x great grandfather on her mother’s side was a Silvester Saul. He married Ann Blyde at Penistone, Yorkshire in 1791. We have a chart that is headed by Silvester and Ann and know a fair amount about their descendants. It appears that Silvester had a brother Michael who married a Winifred Blyde so it may be that we have brothers marrying sisters. Both these families were of the Catholic faith. The parentage of the brothers is uncertain though Silvester may be the Silvester Saul baptised on 22 November 1761 at the house of D Shuttleworth, the son of John and Catherine (nee Cowper?).

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