The family of Henry Lemon

Many times I have been asked how the Knowles Collection can be helpful to researchers. There are many reasons, but I feel the combining of many records in one location is the best answer. I think the study of the Lemon family best shows this.

Many years ago when I began trying to take the Mordy Collection from a microfilmed collection to a fully searchable electronic database, the Lemon family was one of the first families I looked at. It stood out to me for many reasons, but the fact that only one record from the Mordy records dealt with them, I was curious. I must admit, at that time I had no idea who Henry Lemon was, but I wanted to find more about the family.

In the Mordy Collection there was a record of the marriage of Lillian Amy Lemon to Reginald George Davis on 7 Jul 1892 in the West End Synagogue in London. That record, shown below, shows Lilian Amy Lemon to be the daughter of Henry Lemon, an engraver.

To try and find more of the family, if there was anymore, I looked in the 1881 British Census hoping to find Lillian and her father Henry, the engraver. What I found was very surprising. In the record below you will find that Lilian was not an only child, and in fact was one of at least 13 children living at 186 The Grove, in London, with Henry and his wife Harriett (FHL film#1341012).

In an attempt to find more on the children of Henry and Lillian, I turned to the 1911 England Census located at http://www.findmypast.com/. In that record, shown below, I was able to locate Herbert Edward Lemon and his family. His wife is listed as Annie Ida, born in Brazil.

According to the census, Herman Edward and Annie Ida had been married for 13 years. This would put their marriage date in either 1897 or 1898. Wanted to try and find the marriage date for them, I turned to the indexes of birth, marriage and death records located on line at http://www.freebmd.org.uk/. The search yielded the following information;

From this we know that Annie Ida had the surname Brandon. With the information found in the census we know that Herbert Edward married Annie Ida Brandon, who was born in 1872 in Brazil. Using that information a search was done of the 1891 Census looking for her with her family.

From the record above, we now that she is the daughter of Frederick Brandon, a Brazilian merchant and his wife Maria. A check of later census records also helped uncover the marriages of 6 of the children and the nine grandchildren. As the search continues I am sure there will be even more grandchildren.

The records used to find this family have been brought together in the Knowles Collection. Thanks to these records and the pedigrees donated by individual family, people are being able to locate their families. Hopefully the collection will continue to grow.

The records of the Lemon family can be found in The Jews of the British Isles Database.