I have been spending much time trying to explore if there could be any truth in my Grandmother's tale of us being descended from a disgraced and disinherited daughter of the Higgins family from Turvey house. This is explained at length on the main site.
It is a far fetched tale to say the least but was told with great conviction, and I am very aware that Grandma's other tall tales turned out to be true. If there is any truth in it then I should be able to find likely candidates in the family trees to be the couple involved. Whatever Grandma said, we can not be directly descended from the wayward daughter, as I have established the direct line of descent of the Pursers for several hundred years, and none of them married a Higgins. However there are endless side branches of the family and it could have been one of them.
I am currently going through the Purser tree in great detail looking for a possible candidate, a young man who could have worked at Turvey House and been involved. So far I have drawn a blank but I will keep looking.
I have sorted out the Higgins family trees in detail back to the 1650's. This was a mammoth undertaking as it is complicated to say the least. I was greatly helped by information from the Mr Hanbury of Turvey House in the 1980's when my Dad had a go at this. A lot more information has come from the excellent website of the Turvey Historical Society without which I could not have done this , so huge thanks to them. Having established the various branches of Higgins,& Longuet-Higgins at Turvey House and Abbey plus Picts Hill House I will attempt to post this if I can find a way of displaying it in a readable format. It s currently on Ancestry at
but I suspect may only be visible to members. Certainly the Turvey House Higgins do not provide a possible wayward daughter that I can find, though it is perfectly possible that at some point a daughter was simply written out of the family tree. Disproving this involves an awful lot of record checking and is taking a long time. No joy yet and I still have the Longuet-Higgins and those descended from Bartholomew Higgins of Picts Hill to investigate.
So this is all work in hand, nobody has jumped out of the historical records as the obvious pair who eloped, but that was never going to be the case anyway. She was cut off from the family and disowned after causing them great shame and scandal so this was never going to be easy. Watch this space I will keep posting how I am getting on.
Comments