The Wingfield Connection part 1 – the Gravestone

In the tin boxes that hold my family’s past are items that seem to link to another family, the Wingfields.  The first item is a photograph probably of a gravestone.  It is presented in a rough wooden frame covered with black paper, lined with red material and has a gold coloured mount, probably pinchbeck.  I think it is an ambrotype (collodion positive) which, although most common from 1855 to 1865, were still in production up to the 1890s; the later ones being produced by itinerant photographers working outdoors.

Gravestone for Joseph Wingfield and Sarah Brittain

The inhabitants of the grave are SB (Sarah Brittain), JW (Joseph Wingfield) and AW, who I am yet to identify confidently.

Sarah Brittain is my great-great grandmother, she was John Brittain’s second wife and Joseph and Elisha Hanshews’ elder sister.  John’s first wife, Elizabeth, died in 1835 and he married Sarah in 1837.  He died after Sarah in 1885.

The poem on the gravestone is by Sarah; I have two other examples of her poetry, both from 1883, the year she died; the earlier is to her grandson, William, on his departure for Australia and the second is “to her loving baby child”.  At this time she was living in Balley Villas, Tonsley Road, Wandsworth.

At the time of his death in 1873 Joseph Wingfield was in the Three Counties Lunatic Asylum in Ardsley Bedfordshire while the 1871 census shows Emma, his wife, living in Church Road, Great Stanmore, Middlesex.  Emma is of independent means and is sharing her home with Sarah Brittain and Sarah’s youngest child, Emma Elizabeth, who are both working as governesses.  Next door Charles Adams, a schoolmaster, has five boys boarding with him.  In ten years’ time, the 1881 census shows the three women still living together; Emma, now widowed, draws her income from “a small house and 4 cottages”, Sarah’s source of income is from house property and Emma Elizabeth is working as a milliner.

Parish register records now on Ancestry website identify Joseph’s burial as taking place on July 8^th 1873 at St. John the Evangelist Great Stanmore.  My next step is to visit the graveyard to see if the stone is still there and to see whether either John Brittain or Emma Wingfield have been interred with their spouses.

Barbara