We recently featured in our news pages the quest of local genealogist June Ellis to piece together the missing links of a family heirloom.
Here June delves deeper into her family's past, showing how first appearances of ancestors can be deceiving...

Researching family history is fun. Even more enjoyable is putting flesh on the bare bones of family skeletons.
On the spear side I come from a long line of Balls and Rimmers and deep into the nineteenth century son followed father into farm labouring or smallholding. They showed no imagination as to male names, William Ball would begat John Ball who in turn would begat another William and so ad infinitum.
Not much fleshing to do on those bare bones.
I don’t wish to appear feminist (I do really) but some of the women who joined the Ball family were far more complex than their menfolk and came from more interesting stock.
In her late years I loved my grandmother Sarah Louise Ball dearly but remember her as a rather dried up dour old lady and have a picture of her that confirms that impression.
However - and this is what set me searching into her background - I found a fragmented photograph of her taken about a hundred years ago when she was about twenty.
I pieced it together and found a beauty! A wide mouthed, lustrous tressed, bold black-eyed beauty! Even the all encompassing dress of the period cannot disguise her slim waist and attractive figure. She is carrying a cabinet photograph of another pretty girl. Possibly this is her sister Eva.
This was so different from the rather acidulous old lady I knew that I was inspired to investigate her background and what a rich vein I struck!
She was born a Lanceley. This little offering concerns her father William Pritchard Lanceley. The more I discovered about him the more fascinated I became. He had a life full of incident and excitement and died as he had lived.
He was a Liverpudlian born in 1859. He went to sea as a twelve year old and in 1875 he was cabin boy on the ‘River Boyne’ a cargo ship carrying coal on a voyage from Liverpool to Valparaiso, Chile. This was before the Panama Canal was built and meant rounding the fearsome Cape Horn.
At the most southerly point of the voyage near the Diego Ramirez Islands just North of Antarctica the mariner’s most dreaded enemy struck. Fire!
An account written by Charles Allcot the mate of the vessel and the ship’s log can be examined at Liverpool’s Maritime Museum and what fascinating reading it is. I give a shortened version.
A dense volume of smoke and fire in the hold that seemed unstoppable. The captain ordered the hatches battened down and steered towards the mainland hoping to find sanctuary before the ship either sank or the decks blew up.
It was an epic journey. Night fell. It was bitterly cold. There was a stiff gale with heavy snow and sleet squalls. The smoke was causing constant vomiting. At last after Herculean efforts the ‘River Boyne’ rounded Fals Cap de Hornos (False Cape Horn) and anchored in a small bay surrounded by high snow covered mountains.
The crew took to the boats and fought the fire from these. The carpenter cut holes in the deck and sea water was pumped on to the burning coal. It took four days to extinguish the fire and by then the ship was waterlogged and quite unseaworthy. The captain takes special note of William Lanceley’s part in fighting the flames.

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