#i keep thinking about this guy speculating on why a certain kid has a weirdly advanced understanding of math...

[minicy]

Big fan of one certain coworker theorizing about & armchair diagnosing children who already have records & diagnoses. "What's up with (kid) and (kid behavior)?" we have a behavior plan about it?? "i bet its autism" buddy... you don't have to bet... we have an autism specialist... "have you noticed This?" and This is the kid's IEP goal area, like, yes I have noticed, I fill out inventories about This literally every day. its amazing how much easier your job is when you read emails and paperwork

[monthly-raining]

characters as adults

i sometimes throw up in my mouth thinking about my old art style im so much happier and expressive except i havent figured out how to add color lmaooooo

im thinking these are everyone in their early 30s

i think sophie would become a keeper... bc its literally in the series title... maybe emissary too? anyway i dont think shed be the happiest in her position but i think when she grows up she'll start to resemble oralie a lot. maybe some people will put two and two together but this might be eons after oralie resigns from the council and it becomes a little irrelevant at that point

sophie WILL go bald at a certain point when she has the biggest existential crisis

i dont know how to draw dex in general because i just dont have a clear image of who he is this late into the series... bc its been such a long time since book 9 and i havent preordered 9.5 yet

i think he might actually be the most successful out of everyone bc everyone seems to agree that he's a very talented technopath and he worked with the council when he was only a level three??? even if it was making sophie's circlet???? very impressive accepted into harvard 10/10

i love drawing biana shes just ugh. very gorgeous. cant tell if she'll live a celebrity life in the elven world or shed just mysteriously disappear for the longest time and have everyone speculate on what happened to the youngest vacker and she just comes back with like a billion luster book deal to write an autobiography of what she was up to and its basically her freaking out over the ugliest fashion trends ("i leave for three centuries and you guys make THIS a trending item of clothing????") bc biana will always stay biana

linh will cut her hair along with the silver tips. still do not know how the silver tip works. i love drawing her moles, i feel she just has to have a lot of them around her face. she volunteers for animal rehabilitation. she gives free seminars for young hydrokinetics to teach them how to control their abilities. what a woman

im the iffiest with his rendition but he probably grew out the silver tips with his sister and he toggles between keeping his bangs out of his face and keeping it down

weirdly, i think hed be a teacher of some sorts. maybe tutor for 5-10 year olds? i feel like hed be good with small kids

they get their ears pierced together. keefe's a little sadder as an adult. he also grew out his hair

fitz hasn't changed his style much

not sure why keefe is sad. i feel like the older he got in the series, the more sadder he got. it makes sense-- id be sad too. later on, he'll be happy again but i think seeing how long an elven lifespan is theyre probably still considered babies. he has time to figure it out

it'd be really nice if fitz became an author or journalist. i think alden should quit his job as emissary and write an autobiography. i think all the vackers should start journaling and not join evil organizations as a mode of therapy.

[entwinedmoon]

John Torrington: Made in Manchester

(Intro post here)

(FYI, I already wrote about a lot of the info in this post previously over here, but I want all my Torrington research grouped together in this series, so apologies for repeating myself. Anyway...)

When researching someone from history it’s a good idea to start at the beginning. When and where was John Torrington born? Who were his parents? What sort of family did he have?

But in order to find all that out, we need to work backwards. The John Torrington who signed up for the Franklin Expedition gave some important information about his life in the Muster and Allotments books. Also, and this might seem a bit morbid (of course, I’m studying a frozen corpse as a hobby, so what isn’t morbid about all this), we need to take into consideration the information on his tombstone. In tracking down his birth records, we have to match those records to what we know about him from his time with the expedition.

So what do we know about him? What things should we be looking for when tracking down his birth info?

There are three main pieces of information that we need to match with the Franklin Torrington to be sure that we’ve found the right guy:

He was born in Manchester

He was nineteen when he signed up in May of 1845 and twenty when he died on January 1, 1846, so he was most likely born during the latter half of 1825

His mother was named Mary.

It’s important to have as many pieces of additional information besides a name to match up the right person when combing through archives. There’s almost never just one person of a certain name born around the same time. Some names in particular are very common, and it can be hard to narrow down who’s who. For instance, John is an incredibly common name. In fact, it was the most common name on the Franklin Expedition, with 23 out of the original 134 crewmembers being named John. That is 17% of the crew, or more than one-sixth. If I were looking for someone named John Smith, I would probably have given up once the first page of results on Ancestry.com showed me millions of hits for that same name.

Luckily, Torrington is not that common of a last name. Searching on Ancestry gives me baptism registries for two likely candidates:

I’ll call this one JT1:

And this is JT2:

Looking at these two fine fellows we can see each one has some points in their favor, but each one also has some against. Let’s start with JT1.

JT1 was baptized in Norfolk on January 11, 1824. He lived in Walsoken, which is in the county of Norfolk. His parents were William (a laborer) and Mary. Now right off the bat we can see that JT1 gets a point in his favor by having a mother named Mary, but also two points against—he was not born in Manchester and he was baptized in early 1824, which means he most likely was born late 1823. That would make him about two years too old to be the Torrington on the Franklin Expedition.

Now, is it possible that the information in the Muster book is wrong? Yeah, sure, of course it’s possible. People didn’t have photo IDs and birth certificates they had to bring in to sign up for things back then. It’s possible that when they asked where Torrington was born, he said Manchester because he was living there at the time he joined up (I don’t know if he was living there or not, I’m just spitballing here). He could have gotten confused, or perhaps he just blatantly lied. The same is true of his age. He could have given the wrong age by accident, or on purpose. I’ve seen the wrong ages in records while hunting down Torrington’s relatives, and there are even known examples of the ages being wrong on records for the Franklin Expedition.

According to Ralph Lloyd-Jones, Thomas Evans, one of the ship’s Boys on Terror, was technically 17 when he signed up, but he was put down as 18 to meet the minimum qualifications for polar service. And then there’s William Braine, one of Torrington’s grave-mates on Beechey Island. He was born March 1814, which would have made him 32 when he passed away in April of 1846. His tombstone accurately records his age as such, but the plaque on his coffin says he was 33. It’s weird that the tombstone says one thing and the coffin plaque another, but clearly mixing up ages and dates can happen, so maybe JT1 put down the wrong age and place of birth and he’s the right guy. But that’s depending on a lot of ifs and buts to make it work.

Let’s take a look at the other option.

JT2 was baptized December 10, 1826 in Manchester. His full name was John Shaw Torrington and his parents were William (a coachman) and Sarah. Now, this Torrington was born in the right place, but he’s got the wrong mom and, yet again, the wrong birth year. Interestingly, his father has the same name as JT1’s, but he has a different profession. Is this the same William?

Looking further into it, William Torrington married Sarah Shaw on May 18, 1823. He was listed as a coachman on his marriage certificate, too, so this has to be a completely different William Torrington from JT1’s father (also, an intriguing fact to note, William signed his name with an X while Sarah was able to give her full signature). But how could JT2 possibly be the right Torrington when his mother isn’t named Mary? Wouldn’t that make JT1 a better fit?

Not exactly.

While yes, JT2’s birth mother was Sarah, she sadly passed away in 1833. Three years later, in 1836, William remarried (weirdly enough, he was able to sign his name now). Who was his second wife? A widow by the name of Mary Hoyle.

So JT2 did have a mother named Mary by the time he entered the Navy to join the expedition, and he was born in Manchester, which gives him two points in his favor. I've noticed when researching Torrington that it seems John Shaw has been unofficially recognized as the Torrington who sailed with Franklin. Even on Torrington's Wikipedia page, his name is listed as John Shaw, even though the reference listed for his name doesn't actually say that. After comparing his record to the only other known John Torrington who would be around the right age, I agree that he's the one.

But what about his birthdate? Wouldn’t being born in 1826 make him too young to be our guy?

Well, all the arguments I mentioned before about how dates and ages could be wrong still stand in this situation, so it’s possible he just aged himself up a bit, on purpose or not. But we also need to keep in mind that this is his baptism registry and not his birth certificate, so it could be days, weeks, or even months later than his actual birth. In fact, I’ve heard that some families would wait years before baptizing a child. Sometimes, they would wait until they had another kid or two in tow before hauling them all in to get a holy dunking. Did something like that happen here?

Maybe—because he wasn’t the only Shaw Torrington baptized on this day.

On a different page of the registry we find a record for one Esther Shaw Torrington. She was baptized the same day—December 10, 1826—and her parents were William and Sarah. William was a coachman, and while this time their surname was listed as Shaw Torrington rather than just Torrington, this is clearly the same family. That means John had a sister, but was she a twin? Or were they different ages, and one of them was hauled in when the other was born for a two-for-one baptism deal?

While I can’t find Esther’s precise birthday, her death record shows that she had to have been born after September 19, 1826 (she died September 19, 1878, age 51—she should have turned 52 that year if she was born in 1826, which means her birthday is later in the year). That means Esther was probably born sometime within a couple months before her baptism. If John were her twin, then he would have been 18 when he joined the Franklin Expedition and 19 when he died. While the age he gave to the Navy could be wrong—and subsequently, would be wrong on his tombstone—I’m inclined to think he was born a year before his sister and that the ages given in the Muster book and on his tombstone are correct.

Of course, that means we’re not anywhere close to narrowing down his exact birthdate. He was listed as 19 on May 12, when he signed up for the Franklin Expedition. For all we know, he turned 20 just days later, (although I like to think if he were that close to his birthday, they may have rounded his age up or indicated it somewhere). So the earliest his birthday could be is mid to late May, but what’s the latest date it could be? Technically, there could be as little as 10 months between John’s and Esther’s birth, which means that John could have been born in January 1826 (maybe February, if Esther were born in late November, but that’s kind of pushing it). This gives us a wide berth for his actual birthday, making it difficult to pin down.

Personally, I like to think he was born in autumn 1825, but that’s just speculation and wishful thinking (October would be the perfect month for the man whose frozen face would launch a thousand childhood nightmares of mine).

But if he were born in 1825, why wasn’t he baptized until December 1826? Were his parents saving up all their kids to get them baptized all at once? There was apparently such a thing as a baptism party, although those seem to occur when there are more than two children. Maybe Sarah and William liked the idea of baptizing all their children together. Maybe Sarah became pregnant with Esther only a couple months after having John, and they decided to wait when they realized they would need to do another baptism in several months’ time. Maybe they were just too busy when John was born to take the time to bring him to Manchester Cathedral.

Or maybe it was because William was being indicted.

The Lancashire Archives has a Recognizance of Indictment for one William Torrington of Manchester, coach driver, from June 15, 1825. I ordered a scan from the archives and transcribed it the best I could (adding in some punctuation for clarity).  [UPDATE: There was a phrase I couldn't transcribe at first ("the said," spelled with a long s), but I've figured it out since and have updated the post.]:

“Lancashire to wit.

Be it remembered, That on the 15th day of June in the sixth Year of our Sovereign Lord George the Fourth [1825] of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, etc. William Torrington of Manchester Coach Driver[,] George Calvert same place Farrier and Esther Shane same place Widow [off to the side is written Mr. Norris/Morris, perhaps the name of the Judge] severally personally came before me one of the Justices of our said Lord the King, assigned to keep the Peace within the said County, and acknowledged severally to owe to our said Lord the King the said William Torrington the price of Forty pounds[,] George Calvert and Esther Shane twenty pounds each of good and lawful Money of Great Britain, to be made and levied of their Goods and Chattels, Lands and Tenements, respectively for the Use of our said Lord the King, his Heirs and Successors, if the said William Torrington shall make default in the Condition hereunder-written.

The Condition of this Recognizance is such, that if the above bounden William Torrington personally appear at the next General Quarter Sessions of the Peace, to be holden by adjournment at the Parish of Manchester, in and for the said County of Lancaster, and then and there to answer such Bill or Bills of Indictment as shall be preferred against him [crossed out from the typed form “for an assault upon”] and in the mean Time do keep the Peace and be of good Behaviour to our said Lord the King, and all his liege Subjects, [crossed out “especially towards the said”] then the Recognizance to be void, or else remain in full force.

Acknowledged before me William Torrington To answer [crossed out “for an Assault, etc.]”

Basically, in mid-June of 1825, William Torrington was arrested but released from jail, to return to court at a later date under penalty of a fine. A couple people he knew, George Calvert and Esther Shane, backed him up, promising to cover his expenses if he failed to reappear in court.

I have not been able to find information on why he was indicted—that information would most likely be in the Indictment Roll, which I would have to go through at the Archive itself, something made difficult with an ocean between me and Lancashire. It’s also possible that there is no further information available about William’s indictment, or at least none that has survived. I skimmed through the Lancashire order book for 1825 but didn’t find any mention of William or his indictment (with a closer reading, maybe I’ll stumble upon something). However, it’s possible that the case never went to trial, and that’s why it does not appear in the order book. And considering that he had a daughter the next year, whatever outcome happened clearly didn’t keep him out of commission for long

Whether or not his case went to trial, facing legal peril has a tendency to push everything else in life to the wayside, even the birth of a first child. Any fees that he may have incurred from the indictment and any related issues may have caused a temporary financial burden on William and Sarah, making it difficult for them to have John baptized. This is of course just one of many possible explanations for why John Shaw Torrington was baptized in 1826 and not in 1825, the year it’s assumed he was actually born, but we’ll probably never know the real reason.

And now, since I have written over 2400 words analyzing just Torrington’s baptism registry, I think I’ll bring this post to a close. Next up: what little we can piece together of his life growing up, before he joined the Franklin Expedition.

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Torrington Series Masterlist