T - Tabitha Turtle

Tabitha was born on 29 June 1831 in St Marylebone, Westminster. On her baptism record on 7 August that year at All Souls her father is recorded as a Servant and Chandler and the family were living at 22 Harley Mews. Tabitha was the eldest known child of Thomas Turtle/Turtell/Tuttle and his wife Ann nee Boddington. Her parents were both from Oxfordshire and had married at Christ Church, Southwark, Surrey on 7 August 1828.

DNA matches link Tabitha to my family through the Boddingtons with her mother likely to have been a sister of my great great great grandmother Hannah.

By the time of the 1841 census Tabitha has 4 younger siblings, there was a fifth who had died aged about fourteen months. At this time the family seems to be one of six families living in one building in Upper York Street, perhaps a tenement. Thomas is only recorded as a male servant.

In 1851 Tabitha is employed as a Parlour Maid to the Vicar in Peasmarsh Sussex. Her father and brother were still in St Marylebone, lodging with a husband and wife in Little George Street where the head of the house was a Coachman and Thomas was recorded as a Cab Driver. Her sister Maria is a scholar at the Parochial School in New Road Sy Marylebone, and Rebecca the youngest sibling is living with an aunt and uncle in Standlake Oxfordshire. I have been unable to find either her mother or her sister Ann in 1851. Perhaps they had died and this is why the family were spread across four different households at the time of the census.

In 1856 Tabitha and her sister Maria emigrated to South Australia arriving at Port Adelaide on the Fitzjames on New Years Eve 1856. Two years later she married John Hooker. They had one child before he died in Kapunda in 1860 aged thirty-nine. Very soon after his death Tabitha remarried to Thomas Cook.

Two years later, Tabitha’s youngest sister joined them in South Australia, sailing on the Sir John Lawrence, the first ship to arrive under a new Emigration Scheme.

But what happened next? There is a death in New Zealand for a Tabitha Jane Cook under suspicious circumstances in 1875, but the age doesn’t quite fit to be this Tabitha. But then information on death certificates is notorious for being error filled.

Do you know the Turtle/Turtell/Tuttle family? Can you help me?