RootsChat.Com

Hello Hackstaple,

I am researching Charles Riley, whom I believe to my great-grandfather.  What I can't find is his birth on Saint Helena Island around the right date, but I did find a John Charles Riley born on St Helena on 16 February 1857, and wondered if you knew if this was the husband of Alice Frances Butler?  If so, later in life it would seem he started using Charles as his first name.

I am afraid that all of my efforts to find the exact baptismal record of Charles Riley have failed and I have had contact with another descendant who has also struck out. However the Charles Riley who left St. Helena about 1880 and the one who married Alice Frances Butler in Cape Town are one and the same. Eventually we settled on John Charles Riley and his father John born about 1836. That John was the son of the invalided soldier Charles who married the slave Mary Sam before she was emancipated. It is fairly certain from the DNA records of my own children that Mary came from Madagascar and was of eventual Malysian origin. .  Charles became a significant trader in Bechuanaland and founded the town of Maun and had a hotel, store and garage there which devolved on his son Charles Harry de Bouveoir Riley who made the hotel a mecca for hunters visiting Ngamiland. That Riley was always known  as Harry. There were other children. By his first marriage to a woman, whose name is lost, James (Jim) Riley a hunting guide and road surveyor and Katherine (Kath) who married and lived in Pretoria. (I married Jim's daughter). From his union with Alice Butler there came Cecil Myer, Harry, Ernest and Isobel Violet. Cecil ran Riley's Departmental Store in Mafeking. Ernest stayed in Cape Town. Violet married a Mr. Olley and they moved to Fort Victoria where they ran a store. That family now live in in Suffolk from where the original Olley came.

I hope you do manage to find a copy of the actual sheet music.

But here is a framed copy of music pictures ......

https://www.mediastorehouse.com/lebrecht/king-country-need-i-do-song-12078630.html

or just the picture..... http://www.rootschat.com/links/01ran/

Very nice looking and I may just do that with the photocopies that I have. "Daphne de Marie" is my grandmother whose maiden name was Damary.

I am looking for an old piece of sheet music called "Your King & Country Need You More Than I do" by Stanley V. Murrill. This would have been published between 1913 and 1916. The composer was my maternal grandfather who was killed in France November 1917.

I would pay any reasonable price for this. I would not consider £50 too much to pay.

I have a poor photocopy from the British Library.

Agree on Scottowe - a name once found on the Isle of Man.

Samuel Fisher was a very skilful engraver of steel plates whose career extended from the early 1830's up to about 1852. He died in 1855. He was exceptional at translating the mood that artists had put into their work and notably the half-dozen of Turner's works that he engraved.

Like most of his profession he was a competent artist himself and many of his engravings are entirely his own composition.

I have some thousands of old engravings as I used to deal in old maps and prints and amongst them are several by this engraver.