My Mother's Ancestors and Relations


My mother was Pascha Trevenen James (1919-1978), and this page is a guide to the material on the website about her ancestors and relations. The pages linked from here include family trees (pedigrees) and pages discussing the relevant family history (including biographical notes on family members). I plan to add links to the relevant source document catalogues.

The family trees can be viewed either in SVG format (which can be scrolled up, down, left and right in a normal web browser) or as PDF files, which can be downloaded and printed. Family trees showing living people are protected by a password, and are intended only for my cousins shown on them - please contact me for the relevant access details.

John Barnard
Updated 17 Dec 2020

James, Trevenen, Coulson and Leah

My mother's maiden name was James, and her male-line ancestors came from West Cornwall, where they intermarried with other Cornish families including Trevenen (a name which continues to be used as a given name by many of my cousins), Coulson and Leah. Though there were relatively few marriages between people who were already related by blood (i.e. who had a close common ancestor), there were a lot of marriages between people who were already related by marriage, and the following family trees try to show these rather complicated connections diagrammatically:

Some biographical and other information on my James ancestors is given on the following pages:

My first cousins on my mother's side, and their descendants, are shown on the following family tree:

My grandfather Lionel James had just three first cousins on his father's side, shown on the James, Coulson and Leah pedigree. Only one of them had any issue, in the form of the remarkable Peggy Scott (1897-1996), who I remember well and who married for the first time in her early eighties, and lived to be 99; I am planning to write some biographical notes about her.

Rosher, Hindle and Mackinnon

My grandfather Lionel James's mother was a Rosher, and her male-line ancestors came from northwest Kent, initially in Rotherhithe, and later around Gravesend; they became rich and successful businessmen and philanthopists and for several generations they also owned Trewyn, an estate in Monmouthshire. The Roshers had a tendency to both fecundity (including several families with ten or twelve children) and longevity. Lionel James had no less than twenty-eight first cousins on his mother's side, born between 1857 and 1876, seven of whom lived into their eighties, four into their nineties and one (Mary van Straubenzee, née Rosher) died just short of her 102nd birthday in 1967, the only centenarian I have so far identified among my blood relations. The following family tree traces them back to the early seventeenth century:

Lionel appears to have had relatively little contact with most of these cousins, which is unfortunate, as some of them had quite interesting connections. His first cousin Charles Henry Rosher (1858-1936) was the father of the multiple Oscar-winning cinematographer Charles Rosher, and grandfather of the Hollywood actress Joan Marsh. Percy White Rosher (1859-1928) married the niece of the revolutionary political philosopher, and co-author of the Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels (who was a neighbour of the Roshers on Regents Park Road in London). Extraordinarily, Engels seems to have given financial support to Percy Rosher, despite the latter's involvement with his own family's substantial business interests - this is a subject for further research!

Lionel James's eldest brother, Henry Rosher James (1862-1931), known as Bobby, married Mary Edith Hindle (1864-1947). Through they were not related to each other, his uncle George Rosher (1832-1877) was already married to her aunt Mary Hindle (1834-1919), and the following family tree shows their connections to several other families (including Henderson, Neville, Radcliffe, Pennington, Templeton and van Straubenzee): 

I have drawn this tree mainly to show the links to various relations that are mentioned in the memoirs of two of Henry Rosher James's children. His elder son Harold Hindle James is mentioned above, and his daughter Mary Hindle Mackinnon ("Mollie") (1899-1996) also wrote some memoirs, which were privately published. She married an Australian, and was the only one of Henry's children to have children of her own, shown on the following family tree:

Clabburn

My mother's mother's maiden name was Clabburn, and her male-line ancestors came from the city of Norwich, where they had been weavers and shawl manufacturers for generations, building an extremely successful family business in the mid-nineteenth century. Given the popular caricature of Norfolk people as highly inbred, it is notable that my researches into this family have yet to identify any marriages between relatives (even ones related only by other marriages) whereas there are several such instances in other branches of my ancestry. The following family tree shows the Clabburn family back to the late 18th century: The following pages describe the history of the family and some of its members:
My grandmother seems to have taken on much of the responsibility for her five younger siblings after their father's early death in 1901, and despite their scattering around the world, she maintained contact with them, which continues among most of their descendants to this day. The following family trees show those descendants, who are now sufficiently numerous as to require four separate trees: As the family continues to grow, I would be grateful to be informed (see contact details) of any new additions to these family trees, and of any errors or omissions.

Pearsall, Hamilton-ffinney and Lee

My maternal grandmother's mother was Rosey de Pearsall (c. 1851-1922) and her male-line ancestry can be traced fairly reliably via some 18th-century industrialists in Gloucestershire back to the West Midlands in the 17th century. There are published pedigrees taking it right back to the Norman Conquest (and beyond), though a vital connection in this descent appears to have been fabricated in the 18th century and must be regarded as extremely dubious. Rosey's family (the "de" in her surname was a 19th-century affectation) did nonetheless have some interesting and aristocratic connections: her grandfather was the composer Robert Lucas Pearsall (1795-1856), and her aunt's husband rather unexpectedly succeeded as 7th Earl of Harrington in 1865, and through their descendants her family has a rather tenuous connection with the Royal Family. Her mother came from an army family, the Hamilton-ffinneys, and was a grand-daughter of the linguist Rev. Dr. Samuel Lee (1783-1852), Professor of Arabic and Hebrew at Cambridge. The following family tree shows these various connections:

Biographical information on some of the Pearsalls is given on the following pages: