This post concludes my account of the lives of the children of my 3 x great grandparents, John and Mary Ann Londors of Barking. In previous posts, I’ve reported what I know about my 2 x great grandfather John Schofield Londors, his sisters Elizabeth and Mary Ann, and his brother William.

John and Mary Ann Londors’ youngest child, George, seems to have died in 1856 at the age of 10. The only one of their surviving children about whom I’ve been unable to discover anything substantial is Sarah. For now, I have no definite records for her after the 1841 census, when she was 11 years old. A ‘Sarah Ann Londers’ was married in the Romford area in the final quarter of 1853 (when ‘our’ Sarah would have been 23), but until I order a copy of the certificate, I have no way of knowing if this is the right person, and if so, the name of her husband.

That leaves James, who was born in Barking in about 1843, the sixth of John and Mary Ann Londors’ seven children. Like his sister Mary Ann, James never married, and he appears to have lived in Barking, working as a farm labourer, for (almost) his entire life.

Farm and cottages in Barking

The 1851 census finds James, aged 8, living with his parents and siblings at ‘Beehive’, Barkingside. Ten years later, aged 18, he is still with them at Hattons Corner (which I believe to have been the same address), and is now working as an agricultural labourer.

There is a mysterious gap in the records for James in 1871. He wasn’t living with his parents at the time of the census, and I’ve been unable to find him anywhere in the neighbourhood. It’s possible that, like his unmarried sister Mary Ann, he was living and working away from his home area at this date.

By 1881, though, James was back in Barking, living with his widowed mother Mary at ‘Hattons Corner Beehive’. He was now 38 years old. His mother died in 1887 and by 1891 James, now 47, had been joined at ‘Hattons Cottages’ by his sister Mary. They were still there, at what was now known as Carswell Cottage, in 1891, when James, 57, was still working as a farm labourer and Mary, 60, was acting as housekeeper.

The 1911 census finds James, 68, now a retired farm labourer, and Mary, 70, a housekeeper, still at ‘Carswell Cottages, Roding Lane, Barkingside’. Incidentally, we learn from this record that the cottage had three rooms.

A Victorian farm labourer's cottage

James Londors continued to live at Carswell Cottage for the remainder of his life. He died on 3 April 1926 at the age of 83, leaving effects valued at £228 14s 1d to his nephew ‘Ernest Victor Smith postmaster’, son of his sister Elizabeth.