Catherine de Mai

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Catherine de Mai:
Foundling baby


CatherineDeMaiBox.png

Catherine Le Cras, née de Mai,
at the door of her Seaton Place home


All family tree researchers have brick walls - people in their trees whose parents and more distant ancestors just cannot be identified. The lower down the tree these brick walls are encountered, the more frustrating they can be, but sometimes they are so fascinating in themselves that the inability to progress back further generations is forgiven

John Monet Le Cras sitting outside the Opera House where he was the caretaker for many years


Jerripedia editor Mike Bisson has such a person in his tree - his father's maternal grandmother, known in the family as Catherine May.

So she is shown on the certificate of her December 1873 marriage to Jean Monet Le Cras, caretaker at the Opera House for many years, with her father’s name given as Charles May. But search the censuses in 1851 and 1861 and you will find, as Mike did, that no such Catherine and Charles May were resident either in Jersey or anywhere else in the British Isles.

Société Jersiaise researcher

The answer to this conundrum was provided by the late Jack Worrall, a volunteer family history researcher for La Société Jersiaise, who was helping research the family. It just happened that not long before he had been chronicling records of [General_Hospital_baptisms|births registered by the General Hospital chaplain]] and came across Catherine’s birth record, which was registered with the note ‘trouvée `a la porte d’une maison située dans la rue dite Vauxhall – le 8/5/1854.’ [1]

Great-grandmother Catherine was found abandoned as a baby on a doorstep in Vauxhall Street and taken to the hospital, where she was given the names Catherine de Mai, the latter relating to the month of her discovery. Mike has been unable to unearth any information about how Catherine was brought up but she later anglicised her surname to May and invented a father for her marriage certificate. Whether his grandmother ever knew the truth about her mother’s birth he does not know, but he is pretty certain that his father never did.

Neither did other descendants of Catherine with whom he has come into contact through this Jerripedia article.

Notes and references

  1. By an enormous coincidence the doorstep on which his great-grandmother was found was outside the front door of a property which later became home to the Ashborn family, great friends of Mike for many years
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