Jessie Conrad in Context: A George Family History

AS WITH THE HISTORY of many families that of Joseph wife, Jessie, nee contains its mythic elements, its skeletons in the closet, including children born out of wedlock, and its blank spots. There are the usual unhappy marriages, premature deaths, and relocations in search of employment as the labour market changed. The story of her maternal ancestors is intimately linked to the large shifts in population characteristic of late Georgian and early Victorian England, and it likewise involves colonial history, with members of the family immigrating to South Africa and Canada after the turn of the twentieth century.That we know about any of these things is due to several developments permitting a quantum leap in our previous knowledge about the immediate as well as the more remote family of the woman who, on 24 March 1896 at the St George Hanover Square Registry Office, became Mrs Joseph Conrad, in the presence of her mother and her husband's friends, (Adolph) Phil Krieger and Fountaine Hope. Advances in information technology, the opening up of census materials, and, happily, contact with members of the George and Nash Sex family allow a considerably more detailed account of the family's history than possible less than a scholarly generation ago.Previous accounts of Jessie family background have, almost of necessity, been bare bones ones, and have also suffered from inaccuracy. Jocelyn Baines, who tracked down her certificate, her father's death certificate, and marriage certificate, is content to say that she was ?Cof humble birth (1960; rpt. 1971: 210). Zdzislaw Najder, whose account is also general, describes Jessie George as one of the many children of a warehouseman and shopkeeper, a member of a Catholic family (1983: 192, 194); both the designation shopkeeper and Catholic are in error. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad gives more flesh and specificity to this picture, thanks in part to the research of the late Hans van Marie: Conrad's wife, Jessie Conrad, was the second-born of nine children in a lower middle- class Peckham family that had been left in straitened circumstance in 1892 by the death of the father ... a 'bookseller's assistant.' Following Najder, it also wrongly states that her upbringing was a Catholic (2000: 74).Jessie maternal ancestors were involved in the migration from rural to urban England, from small village to burgeoning London suburb, a pattern E. M. Forster would recall in the story of Leonard Bast in Howards End (1910). Her paternal side also testifies to the steady population explosion in South London's boroughs as the city, ever in need of labourers for a growing population, expanded throughout the Industrial Revolution. The need to house these newcomers provided yet more labour for others - bricklayers, glaziers, housepainters.This story begins with the maternal side of Jessie family in the late eighteenth century.The GeorgesAccording to George family tradition, the family was of Huguenot descent, the surname possibly originally spelled Georges, a spelling, like George, occurring in Huguenot records. The Huguenots settled largely in London and Southeast England, coming in large numbers - as many as 40-50,000 - from the late 1670s to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Many congregated in East London and were typically involved in the textile trade (Gwynn 1985; rpt. 2001: 47-49, 6, 87). Whilst useful for understanding this large-scale immigration, records of Huguenot settlement are sporadic, and tracing specific families and individuals is more often than not frustrated by the patchy evidence. There is thus no means to confirm family legend here.The most distant of Jessie known paternal ancestors was her great-grandfather, Richard a baker, born about 1775, and established in time in Lambeth at 19 Spring Place, off Wandsworth Road, an area of meadows and large properties that during his lifetime saw enormous change as London expanded southwards across the Thames. …

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