Originally published in Who Do You Think You Are magazine, February 2025.
The Story Of A Street
Rosemary Collins talks to a reader of the magazine who’s researching the history of his road in Bedford.
The recent return of BBC Two’s award winning series A House Through Time has reminded us that house history can be just exciting as family history. It involves using the same skills to trace the lives of everyone who lived in a particular property.
Derek Turner has taken house history one step further by tracing the lives of everyone who lived on his street – Waterloo Road in Bedford, 20 miles north of Luton.
As he explains, he first became curious when he moved to the street in 2022, living next door to his son Mark. Derek asked him whether he had the deeds to his house, which he didn’t, because the records had been accidentally burned. But Mark did have a collection of documents relating to the Bower Estate, a middle-class estate built in the town between the 1880s and 1900s that included Waterloo Road.
This led Derek to trace the street’s residents up to 1939, using such records as census returns, the property-valuation returns of 1902, the 1910 Lloyd George Domesday Survey, the 1939 Register, a run of street directories and newspapers, plus some unusual sources from Findmypast www.findmypast.co.uk, including a marriage certificate from an Anglican church in Yokohama, Japan.
He says that he was surprised by what he learnt from analysing the records: “Almost half of the household heads were female. Many were young widows or wives. Almost half of the residents had been born, married, lived or worked in India and other British possessions in the Far East. County archivist Pamela Birch explained that what made Waterloo Road attractive to the ex-pats were affordable modern houses for their large Victorian families, and the equally affordable public schools for their teenage children, because most had married much younger wives quite late in life.”
This is true of the most interesting family that Derek researched, the Tisdalls. In the 1901 census they are living at 15 Waterloo Road, which was known as Gery Street at the time. William Tisdall, the father of the family, had been born in India, the son of an Indian army major, and became a clergyman. His three eldest children were also born in India before he and his wife Marian moved with their family to Persia (now Iran), and then back to Britain. By 1901 they had eight children. But tragedy struck when the First World War started. Their eldest son, Arthur, enlisted in the Navy and served in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. He helped rescue several injured men under heavy fire, an act of bravery for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross. But he never received the medal, as he was killed in action only days later. Their second son, John, was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
The couple who married in Yokohama, Fred Owen Eustace and Harriett Rumble, were another family with connections to Asia. Owen, as he was known, was a merchant and the 1901 census record, which shows the couple living at 55 Gery Street, says that three of their five children were born in Japan. Sadly, their eldest son William also died at Gallipoli.
Derek has now moved on to researching neighbouring Albany Road. Among its residents was Mabel Barltrop, the founder of the early 20th century religious movement known as the Panacea Society. He volunteers part-time at Bedford’s Panacea Museum (panaceamuseum.org), and has begun to turn his findings into a blog post on the museum’s website.
Derek says that he will continue his interest in local streets: “Researching a whole street other than just one house provides otherwise unobtainable information, and placing individuals and family in their local social context tells you more about them.”
