We, Carolyn and Chris have two pieces of speculation about John Samuel Oram 1847-1913 and his wife Jane Clark 1846-1890. Too speculative to be included in their own pages but we know that both ideas had occurred to our mother Daphne when she wrote about them in ‘The Oram Family Saga’ in the 1960’s.
1. Were John Samuel Oram and Jane Clark teenage parents of William Clark?
2. What was John Samuel Oram doing in ‘The Clyde area of Scotland’ and was the story of breaking an apprenticeship a cover for his wish to join Jane Clark in America?
1. Were John Samuel Oram and Jane Clark teenage parents of William Clark?
It is odd, but not impossible that Gilbert’s wife Jane gave birth to their daughter Jane when she was about 33 years old and then appears to have no children until she was almost 50 years old when William was born in 1862. As their daughter Jane would have been about 16 when William was born, this looks like a classic case of a grand child being bought up as a child.
Our mother Daphne, who first introduced us to the Clark family in the 1960’s “Oram Family Saga” had always wondered if John Samuel Oram 1847-1913 and Jane Clark 1846-1890 had been childhood sweethearts. William grew up to be an ‘excellent mechanic’ who helped John Samuel in his engineering company, so no doubt Daphne privately speculated that the genes that made William an ‘excellent mechanic’ might have been John Samuel’s.
Unlike us, Daphne did not have full access to the diaries of John Samuel’s father John Oram 1824-1907 and did not know William’s date of birth. Now we can show an interesting sequence of events, information from diaries, though not verbatim, shown in italics:
June 1860: Gilbert Clark arrived at Derradda, Burrishoole, near Newport, County Mayo, Ireland.
John Oram had been Land Agent for Captain Wyndham’s estate since 1853 and Gilbert Clark was the estate’s stockman. The Clarks may have lived in Derradda where John Samuel went to the Protestant School, as implied in John Oram’s diary entry. Another possibility is that they lived in the same complex of farm building as the Orams, close to Burrishoole Lodge. John Oram’s diaries are mainly about farming, rather than land agent’s duties so Gilbert and John could well have worked together.
August 1862: John Samuel left Ireland for an apprenticeship at the railway works in Swindon, Wiltshire, England.
Gilbert’s daughter Jane had been born in 1846 and John’s son John Samuel a year later. Therefore during the two years they were both living in Burrishoole they would have been 13 to 16 year olds.
October 1862: William Clark born
December 1864: Gilbert Clark emigrated to the USA.
Passenger records show that Gilbert, his wife Jane and William travelled together and daughter Jane followed five months later in May 1865.
Fate brought the families together again when in 1867 John Samuel had to leave the United Kingdom in a hurry and took the next ship to the USA.
March 1867 “To Westport with John who left for New York”
John Samuel joined the Clarks in Cleveland Ohio where the couple were reunited and married in December 1867.
2. What was John Samuel Oram doing in ‘the Clyde area of Scotland’ and was the story of breaking an apprenticeship a cover for his wish to join Jane Clark in America?
The oral tradition is that John Samuel broke his apprenticeship after having a row with his employers and was liable to imprisonment, so fled the United Kingdom, that then included Ireland.
In fact by early 1867 John Samuel had moved from Swindon to the Clyde industrial area of Scotland and so may well have completed his apprenticeship. If John Samuel had been employed by North British Railway in Scotland he could well have been very concerned about their very poor safety record, even for those days, in the company’s bid for commercial dominance of the Scottish railways. Read behind the lines of “The crisis of 1866” in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_British_Railway. Just cause to have a row with his employer and John Samuel may have been in mortal danger as a potential ‘whistle blower’.
Maybe John Samuel and Jane were corresponding, John was unhappy in Scotland and he deliberately made his way to Cleveland. Probably a speculation too far!