Ann Archer Archer
Notes on Ann Archer Archer by Nora Emma Rose Archer:
Transcribed by PBA 19.11.2003
Born 16.6.1814;
Baptised St Aldates same day;
Third and youngest daughter of John and Mary Archer;
She remained unmarried and latterly kept house for her younger brother Thomas, also unmarried, at 15 Adelaide Street, Oxford, although it seems likely that the unmarried children remained with their parents until their father’s death, first in St Aldates and, then at 7, St Giles, after John the elder brother took over the brewery and moved to the St Aldates house;
She survived into the 20th century (crossed out in the manuscript text: and was buried in St Sepulchre’s Cemetery, according to my father WGRA) who would have known her and her brother Thomas, when he was living with his (WGRA’s?) parents at 7, Tackley Place, Oxford;
Ann’s sampler is dated; my father said she made the bedspread before it “to learn plain sewing”;
She kept both pieces of work until she died when they went to my grandparents at 7 Tackley Place, and then to my father when his mother died. He gave them to me in about 1956, when he was moving to a smaller house.
N. Archer.
Further notes by NERA
Headed: “Ann Archer Archer”
Transcribed 19.11.2003 by PBA
(Ann Archer Archer) was the fourth child and youngest daughter of John and Mary Archer, who lived in St Aldates;
Her father was a brewer and a Freeman of Oxford;
Ann was baptised at St Aldates Church on the day of her birth; (pba: does this indicate the importance of baptism to her parents, and perhaps also the relative likelihood of infant death in those days?);
The notion of using the surname as a given name also seems to have been borrowed by her parents from John’s younger brother Thomas, vicar of Whitchurch, Bucks, who had six daughters: the first was given her mother’s maiden name as her second given name, and all the rest appear in the baptismal registers with “Archer” as a second given name. Ann’s two older sisters escaped by arriving before Thomas’s idea (for ensuring that his daughters retained the family name when marriage changed their surname) had spread to his brother and sister-in-law;
Ironically, the older sisters both married, while Ann remained single. She and her younger brother, Thomas, also unmarried, lived with their parents in St Aldates until their father, by then a widower, relinquished the Brewery and the St Aldates home to his eldest son, John, and moved to 7, St Giles, for the last years of his life;
After his (their father, John Archer (senior)) death, Ann and Thomas lived for many years at 15 Adelaide Street. Ann was said by my father (WGRA) who knew her when he was a child living at 7, Tackley Place, to have lived into the 20th Century; (pba: seems a strange thing to say when her dates are known, or were they not known then? [Later: no, her date of death is not on her cv, so the comment is helpful]);
Thomas is recorded on the roll of Freemen resident in Oxford, as still living at 15 Adelaide Street in 1902;
Although she remained unmarried, Ann had many close relatives living in Oxford throughout her life:
a)her grandfather, John, (pba: this must be the John Archer before John Archer (senior), so far as present nomenclature is concerned) lived either with or near them in St Aldates during the last twenty years of his life;
b)her aunt Fanny, also unmarried, seems to have been one of the household, and may have lived with Ann and Thomas in Adelaide Street until she died in 1861;
c)Ann’s brother John (“John (junior)”) and his twelve children all remained residents of Oxford for (crossed out) “most of their lives”. All but three of them married and had families so there were numerous great nephews and nieces in the latter decades of the 19th Century. And they kept in touch too, with their cousins and second cousins, the descendants of Uncle Thomas, at Whitchurch, as family letters show; (pba: 12.12.2007: I am not aware of any such letters having been preserved).