Hi there,
I'm also trying to find out what I can about John George Ryall (or Raynes).
I'm descended from the Birmingham Ryalls through my mother (who's now 83). Her grandmother was Henrietta, the youngest of John and Elizabeth Ryall's three daughters. This makes me John George Ryall's great, great grandson.
It's quite amazing, but the family tradition of an ancestor who was the harbour master at Cork has survived for over a century in our branch of the family too, although the detail had all been lost or garbled. The Raynes surname was completely forgotten and nothing of John Ryall was remembered, with the harbour master assumed to be our direct ancestor (instead of, as seems highly likely, his brother). My mother even mistakenly believed until I started researching last year that her grandmother Henrietta had herself been born in Ireland.
Following the link to
http://search.labs.familysearch.org/recordsearch that aghadowey posted (for which many thanks) I found a death record for Henry Christopher Raynes in Cork in 1877, aged only 48. His estimated birth year is given as 1829, which is close enough to the 1828 date in the parish records that jnby posted (another very big “thank you” !)
As you may already know, Theresa, Elizabeth and Henrietta Ryall had a younger brother, also called Henry Christopher. He was born c 1877, so it seems quite reasonable to assume he was named in honour of his recently deceased uncle.
There’s more which I think has a bearing on this. The young Henry emigrated to Canada but eventually returned to Europe during the Great War as a private in the Canadian army (he was in in his late thirties by then and it’s thought he didn’t marry). Henry fought on the Western Front and died of wounds on 14th June 1916. He’s buried in Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery at Poperinge in Belgium. A transcript of his gravestone can be found if you do a search at
http://www.mapleleaflegacy.ca. If you click on the “details” tab, it says that he was the only son of the late John and Elizabeth Ryall of Birmingham.
The really interesting bit though is that it also notes that he “…served as Raynes.” So for reasons completely unknown he chose for that part of his life to use what we assume to be the family’s former surname (perhaps another small mystery there in itself ).
Some quite promising clues here I hope to strengthen the link between John Ryall and the name Raynes in Cork, and even specifically with Captain Henry Raynes.
Paul
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