My grandfather’s family had lived for many generations on the south coast of England, settling eventually in Littlehampton in Sussex where some cousins still live even today. My grandfather’s brother, Wilfred Henry, married a young woman Edith May Kinch, who had been born and brought up in Portsmouth where my husband’s family, the Sparshotts come from. Edith’s father Edwin was a shipwright working in iron and wood, and although he had been born near Brighton, and his wife, also Edith had been born near Littlehampton, they may very well have known the Sparshott family who were living there at the time, also working in the dockyards. (You would have thought Edwin Kinch an unusual name, there are 13 in the birth records!) There were over fifty Sparshotts, working in various naval and sea-faring industries, I can’t believe that my great uncle wouldn’t have known some of them through his marriage to the Kinches.
The Sparshott family in the nineteenth century went backwards and forwards to Kent, some of the children were born there; the Matthews family, although settled in Littlehampton, also travelled along the coast Those families must have bumped into each other, their names must have been familiar. I haven’t found any link except geography, so I don’t think my husband and I are related except by marriage, but that’s fine, isn’t it?!
Lois Elsden 