Robert Hudson Fynn

I re-iterate an email sent to me after another researcher had reviewed this site.  I could not help the writer but maybe the contents could assist other people looking at Hudson Fynns.

The email ran:
From: Nigel Lemon [NigeI.Lemon@btinternet.com]

Sent: 02 May 2005 11:44

To: regency.fr@wanadoo.fr

Subject: Robert Hudson Fynn

Greetings to France from Penwortham, Preston.

I write concerning one Robert Hudson Fynn who features on your website in the section labelled "Unknown parentage". My email contains some possible information, or at least speculation; and also asks a question.

My interest here is not to do with my own family's history, which I leave to others to investigate; and I am as certain as can be that I can claim no relationship to your own! But I have just discovered your website through my current research [for a probable article in a denominational journal] into a 19th Century West Midlands and Cheshire Congregationalist, the soap-powder inventor and manufacturing chemist, Robert Spear Hudson.

I reached your site because of my long-term attempts through Google to find any of Hudson's relations. I knew that Hudson's eldest daughter - Mary Evangeline Hudson, born West Bromwich - had by 1883 [the date of her father's Will] become Mary Evangeline Fynn: to date I had been unable to trace anything else at all about her - until yesterday when "Mary Evangeline Fynn" yielded one hit though the Cornwall 1891 Census Online Project. I then wondered whether, like others in the extended family, she might have used her maiden name as a middle name for a child, tried "Hudson Fynn" - and so discovered "your" Robert Hudson Fynn.

My speculation is that the subject of the 1899 marriage which you have discovered at Chesterton might just relate to a beyond-Cambridge example and could be of a son to Mary Evangeline Hudson, later Fynn. She was born in late 1854/early 1855; she could therefore have been married in 1876 or even earlier [her marriage seems not to have been in England, I suspect it was in Ireland where there were various Hudson family links]; a son could have been of marriageable age by 1899. The family was wealthy, money having been inherited from the Hudson soap-man even before Mary Evangeline's brother sold the business for £1 M [!] in 1908 to Lever Brothers and whatever might be Mr Fynn's own position and income [he was not at home in Falmouth for the 1891 Census]: the Cornwall house had seven servants and governesses. A son might have been a student, as was a cousin, in Cambridge.

I lack information as to her age when Mary Evangeline Hudson became Fynn; I do not know whether you have for your "unknown" Robert Hudson Fynn his age at marriage; the 1891 Cornwall transcript gives Mary Evangeline Fynn's age as 56 - which seems excessive for a mother to children aged 5 and 3 [!] but she seems certainly the right person, having been born in West Bromwich [which I knew], so I put this down to a transcription error although strangely, she could have been 46 rather than 36 which latter mistake in reading would have been the more likely. Perhaps the enumerator heard things incorrectly, not least if Cornish and Blackcountry accents then were as different as they can be now!

This information may have the disappointing effect of writing out Robert Hudson Fynn from your forbears, for which I apologise! But at least it might tidy things up a bit, if it is correct. However, you may know the age of the 1899-married Fynn, and anything like the 1850 birth for which you speculate would put my own speculation entirely out of court. But if you do know any details at all of the man, from a possible sight of the marriage certificate/records etc., then I would welcome any information you might be able to provide.

y warmest thanks for any response you are able to make whenever that may be convenient, 

Nigel Lemon

Comment:  I don't think that this Fynn has any connection with the other Fynns that I have been tracing but hugely interesting nonetheless.  I have all sorts of problems with older relations who have many ideas that we are all related to "Riches".  I will leave it to them to sort a connection with the Spears Soap!!!!!!!!!!

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