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  1. The King Family of Ivychurch

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    The King gravestone temporarily raised last year

    As part of my one place study of Ivychurch in Kent (where I live) I have come to know some inhabitants of the churchyard better than others. Some, such as William Bates, whose grave I can see from my office window and who left 55 grandchildren behind him, seem to have descendants scattered all round the world and I have had several emails from them this year alone! Others grab my attention for other reasons, such as William Kennett King and his wife Louisa. During our churchyard survey last year theirs was one of two stones which had been recumbent for many years and which we managed to raise temporarily to read and photograph. It is an irony that since William and Louisa’s stone had fallen face down, the writing on it was well preserved. Had it fallen the other way this would not have been the case.
    William Kennett King was born in nearby Kenardington in 1867. Although his father was a labourer, William trained as a grocer and by the 1891 census appears in Appledore, just a few miles from Ivychurch, working as a grocer’s assistant. He married Louisa Orman from Ivychurch in 1894 and the couple had two children, Olive and Mabel. By 1911 William and his family had moved to Ivychurch where William was working in his own right as a grocer and draper while both he and Louisa were running the sub- post office at Kent House.
    Sadly their daughter Mabel died in 1919, aged 22, and just a few years later in 1922 both William and Louisa died – within four days of each other! The parish registers show that William was buried on 18th January and Louisa on the 23rd. Receiving an email from one of the King family members I learnt that rumours in the wider family told that Louisa had committed suicide. Seeking the truth behind this tale, I bought her death certificate. Although the death certificate of someone who took their own life will not necessarily record the death as ‘suicide’, an indicator would be that the coroner’s name would be given in the column for the informant and the death would have been subject to an inquest. The date and place of the inquest will also be noted on the certificate from 1875.
    The certificate showed that in actual fact Louisa died from diabetes, from which she had had for two years and four months. She fell into a coma 33 hours before she died and there cannot have been any suspicious circumstances, because there was not even a post mortem. She was 47 years old. It may be the case that once William died she lost the will to live and this may be where the rumours of suicide began.
    Before we leave the Kings, however, another lesson can be learnt, this one regarding accuracy of dates and ages on gravestones and in other sources. William’s age at death is given as 53 in the burial register, on the gravestone and also on the 1911 census. Checking the GRO birth index it was, however, 1867. His daughter Mabel, who is recorded on the same gravestone, has her age given as 23 years, although in the burial records it states 22 years. Checking the GRO birth index again it is probable that she had not reached her 23rd birthday when she died, as her birth was registered in the final quarter of 1896. It is almost certain that Mabel’s sister Olive raised the stone in memory of her family, possibly some years after their deaths because Mabel’s death is the last one mentioned despite the fact that she died first. Olive must have got her father’s age wrong and forgotten that her sister had not had her birthday in the year she died. So bear in mind that any source can be subject to inaccuracies.