Charles Frederick Ashburnham Kelly
Charles Frederick
Ashburnham Kelly
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Kathleen Kelly painted by Jacques Tissot
Charles Frederick Ashburnham Kelly, an Irish army officer, moved to Jersey during his retirement with his second wife Mary Venn, with whom he had his last child at the age of 73, having married her in London at the age of 65
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Workhouse and emigration
He died in the island in 1885, a year after the last child was born, and his wife must have returned to London with her children. The family clearly fell on hard times because in 1891 ten-year-old Percy was recorded in the census in the Union Workhouse in Christchurch, Hampshire.
His younger brother Harry emigrated to Canada in 1896 at the tender age of 14, married, raised a family and died there in Montreal in 1963.
Exact details of the births of Charles Kelly and Mary Venn’s children are difficult to establish, because the couple are variously shown living in Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark during their time in the Channel Islands.
What seems certain is that Charles’ five children by his first wife, Flora Boyd, did not come to Jersey with him. They were all born in India while he was serving there with the East India Company, and the youngest was 21 when he married Mary Venn.
She was Kathleen Ashburnham Kelly (1855-1882), who achieved some notoriety by becoming the mistress of the captain of the ship which took her to India to fulfil her father’s wish that she should marry a surgeon with the Indian Civil Service.
Jacques Tissot
The marriage was soon annulled and on her return to London she became the muse and mistress of the renowned French artist Jacques Tissot.
Charles retired to London in the 1860s, had a son George Francis by 23-year-old Mary, the daughter of a Devon family, in 1875, and married her the following year. They had a daughter Constance in London in 1877, and were in Jersey by the time their third child, Meta Augusta Ashburnham Kelly, was born in 1879. She was followed by Percy John (1880-1952), Harry Fitzgerald (1881-1963) and Ishta Agbnes Irene (1884-1935).
All eleven of Charles’ children had the extra forename Ashburnham – some were registered with it at the time of their birth, others adopted it. It is not known where the name originated. Family legend said that Charles’ father, Frederick, married a Lady Ashburnham and kept her name after her death. Family historians now believe this to be untrue and suggest that it is more likely that he made it up.
Family tree
