Having written over 500 blogs on Port Elizabeth, I am presumed by the readers to be the guru on the minutiae of the town. As a consequence, I am inundated with queries from readers most bordering on the trivia or unknowable. A popular query relates to the request of the name of a fellow pupil at Grey in standard 6 in 1965. Alternatively, when was their house in Havelock Street built?
But when I received an email from William Kennedy stating that he was related to William Fleming, my immediate response was that we were related albeit through a long chain, I never expected his response that he could provide the chain. When he agreed to provide the detail, I was more than pleasantly surprised. The challenge was on.
I had the easiest task between us. All that I that I had to prove was that Rev Francis McCleland’s daughter Adelaide married William Fleming, on the 21st January 1858 and my part of the bargain was met. In the definitive book on the early McCleland family tree by Churchouse, it clearly provides that proof.
William Kennedy’s family tree
William Kennedy’s K’s great great grandfather, William Fleming, Jr married Adelaide McCleland on the 21st January 1858.
William Fleming and Adelaide McCleland had a daughter named Mabel Katherine Fleming (born 30 September 1865 in the Cape Colony)
Mabel Fleming
Shift to the U.K.: Mabel became the family’s legendary Great Storyteller. She married Surgeon Captain Alfred Wright in 1890 and moved the family line from South Africa to the U.K. around 1900. Mabel Fleming and Alfred Wright had a daughter named Mary Ann Wright born in 1892 in the Cape Colony
Mary Ann
Mary Ann moved to England with her parents. In 1913 she married George Tillet in Watford. This is the exact moment that the family surname switched from Wright to Tillet. Mary Ann Tillet and George Tillet had a daughter named Ethel Tillet (born 1906). As a young woman, Ethel Tillet an unmarried relationship with Staff Sergeant William Camplin (the elite WWII Glider Pilot)
Because Ethel Tillett and William Camplin were not married, their daughter – William Edward’s mother – was registered with her father’s surname but her mother’s maiden name :Frances Doreen Camplin (born 2 April 1944 in Watford)
William Kennedy’s mother grew up knowing her grandmother Mabel who lived until 1962 and her mother Ethel who lived until 1989. William Kennedy’s mother – Frances Camplin -married William’s father, Steven Edward Kennedy (from the Cardiff Naval Line,) in October 1963.
William Kennedy (the author) was born on 4 July 1984 in Bournemouth, UK
He has I have two brothers and a sister:
Melissa Kennedy born 1978
Robert Kennedy born 1979
Adam Kennedy born 1980
Source
William Kennedy
