FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH
LOUISA COLLYER
1871-1957
"The road from Liverpool to New York, as they have who have travelled it well know, is very long, crooked, rough, and eminently disagreeable."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, aboard the packet ship New York, 1833
Paul E. Collyer was born on 26 June 1835 in Great Horwood. His father was a farmer with 9 acres and Paul worked with him on the land.
Paul had set out for the United States in 1855 at the age of 20 and settled in Homer, Calhoun, Michigan. By 1860 the census records him as a farmer with his personal estate worth $500 (approximately $16,000 dollars in today’s money). He was obviously someone who was prepared to work hard and determined to succeed in the ‘new’ country.
The American Civil War began in 1861 and on 29 October 1864 at the age of 28 Paul enlisted in the Union Army. He was a Private in ‘B’ Company and served until the end of the war - being demobbed on 26 April 1866. Unfortunately he didn’t survive the war unscathed as his military records note that he was ‘wounded in the right hip’.
In October of 1866, at the age of 30, Paul married Jane Ruell who had been born in Michigan to English parents.
Paul and Jane settled in Homer and raised three children George, Minnie and Helen. Paul continued to succeed as a farmer. In 1870 the census recorded the value of his real estate at $6,000 (approximately $192,000 in today’s money) and his personal estate at $800 ($25,600).
In 1899 after thirty-three years of marriage Jane died of appendicitis and was buried in Fairview Cemetery in Homer.
By this time Paul had become a naturalised American. The 1900 American census shows that he owned his farm but still had a mortgage on the property. His daughter Helen (20) and grand-daughter Bessie Collier (9) are enumerated with him in the 1900 census.
THE BEGINNING
Louisa Collyer was born in Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire, England on 24 September 1871 – the eldest child of John and Ann Collyer.
The Collyer family had lived in the village for generations. John was an agricultural labourer and he and Ann had three other children.
By the age of 20 Louisa had moved to London and was working as a live-in housemaid on King Street in Marylebone. She then worked at the London County Lunatic Asylum in Ilford, Essex as a nurse/assistant.
On 16 February 1904 at the age of thirty-two she arrived at Ellis Island, New York on the ship Ivernia having left the port of Liverpool approximately eleven days previously. Two days later on 18 February 1904 she married her distant cousin Paul Collyer in Calhoun County, Michigan, USA.
THE AMERICAN MARRIAGE
When Paul married Louisa Collyer she was 32 and he was 69 - thirty-six years her senior.
It is safe to assume that Louisa travelled to the USA with the intention of marrying Paul however it is difficult to know whether (or if) they had previously met.
Louisa was born in 1871 and Paul had already left for America in 1855. I can find no record of Paul returning to England and no record of Louisa travelling to America before 1904.
As they were married the day she arrived in Homer it was either an extremely fast courtship or the wedding had been planned previously!
Whatever their motivations for marrying, the marriage did not last long. Eighteen months later on 29 August 1905 Paul died of a heart attack and was buried in Fairview Cemetery with his first wife, Jane.
His death certificate shows that the informant was Louisa Collyer of Homer, Michigan although it is interesting to note that the ‘marriage’ section states that he had been married for thirty-one years with three children still living. It is difficult to understand why Louisa would give this misinformation.
Louisa was left the farm and promptly sold up and returned to England – leaving Paul’s son and daughters with nothing.
THE RETURN TO ENGLAND
Back in Buckinghamshire Louisa bought a row of cottages in Buckingham Road, Winslow naming it Homer Terrace after Homer, Michigan where Paul’s farm had stood.
Two years after her return to England, on 21 June 1907 Louisa gave birth to a son – named Richard Frederick Hafer Hollis Collyer at Fleet Marston in Buckinghamshire.
Richard’s father was John Frederick Hollis. I can find no record of a marriage between the two and, indeed, on the 1911 census, four years after Richard’s birth, John (known as Frederick) is recorded as living with his wife and five children in Buckingham. He had previously worked as a sewing machine agent and was currently a cycle agent.
In 1911 Louisa and young Richard are enumerated on the census with Louisa’s sister Sarah and Sarah’s husband in Fleet Marston. On the census of that year she describes herself as a widow and stated that she was living on ‘private means’.
Two years later in 1913 at the age of 42 she married George Hancock– another elderly gentleman at the time of the marriage. George was 69 and the landlord at the Bull Inn in Winslow. His first wife, Emma, with whom he had had seven children, had died the previous year.
It is highly likely that the Collyer and Hancock family knew each other as both families had lived in Great Horwood for generations.
However as George had moved with his first wife and family to Birmingham in approximately 1871 (the year of Louisa’s birth) he and Louisa must have met upon her return to Winslow – perhaps even at The Bull Inn.
George Hancock died in 1917 and two years after his death in 1919 Louisa married her third husband, George Holt – a fifty-nine year old widower with grown children.
They remained married until George Holt’s death in 1944.
Louisa died in 1957 at the grand old age of eighty-five survived by her only child Richard.
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