MASTERMAN FAMILY BACKGROUND
Mary Elizabeth CASEY and Henry MASTERMAN, parents of Effie, Anne, Bette, Harry and Mick, and grandparents to the Emmetts of Mindrum Terrace, married on 1 January 1907. The marriage certificate gives Henry MASTERMAN's age as 22, but he was in fact only 21 - he celebrated his twenty-second birthday only two weeks before Effie was born. Mary Elizabeth CASEY is also said to be 22 at the time of the marriage, but she was in fact 23, having been born on 12 December 1883.
Mary Elizabeth was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church (at St. Aloysius, Hebburn), whereas the MASTERMAN family were staunch Methodists. It is interesting to speculate how and where Mary Elizabeth and Hentry met, and what his family felt about his marriage. All five children born to Henry and Mary Elizabeth MASTERMAN were brought up in the Methodist tradition, and their paternal grandfather, Michael Bell MASTERMAN, was active in that church, organising the Easter Parades for schoolchildren.
Henry MASTERMAN died at the early age of fifty in 1935, and Mary Elizabeth (Casey) MASTERMAN at the age of sixty-one in 1944.
We know that Mary Elizabeth CASEY was brought up by her maternal grandmother, Mary Ann TOMBLING (whose name has come down to us as "Granny Anthony") and who was still active in the Roman Catholic Church when she was an old woman, living in Shieldfield, Newcastle.
The ANTHONY family had moved from Blakeney, in Norfolk, to South Shields some time in the 1870s. A branch of the MASTERMAN family, originally from Yorkshire, moved to Monkwearmouth, near Sunderland in the 18th century, and then to the Byker area of Newcastle sometime in the 1840s.
We have traced two marriages contracted by Mary Elizabeth's mother Sarah née ANTHONY, and it is likely that she married three times. Her first husband, Mary Elizabeth's father, John CASEY, died in 1884 at the early age of thirty. Sarah married a man called William CLARK two years later, and we are still working on tracing his death and the record of her third marriage. Mary Elizabeth Casey had a half brother, John Edward ANTHONY.
UNFINISHED - MORE TO COME
