Page 3
Princess Alice Disaster -
One area of work that is ongoing is the transcribing and cross referencing of extracts from Newspapers from the British Library files between 1600 and 1900, although we have been concentrating on those of the 1800’s.
In the September 2008 issue of Family Tree Magazine there was an article about the Princes Alice disaster. At about the same time we had found several newspaper articles featuring the disaster and reporting that Hannah Hagger and her five year old daughter Elizabeth Hannah had died in the disaster with more than 640 others. The Princess Alice was on the return leg of a day trip to Sheerness from London and was approaching North Woolwich pier when she collided with the much larger ship the Bywell Castle. The Princess Alice was split in two and within four minutes sank, the passengers being either trapped or thrown into the river. At the time the river was not very pleasant with raw sewage being directly dumped into the river at nearby Beckton.
Hannah (nee Parsons) was married to Arthur Hagger, an oilman from Putney. They had married in 1871 and just had the one child Elizabeth Hannah. Arthur did remarry in 1882 and had three more children – Nellie, Arthur and Sidney. Arthur (senior) had been born in 1846 at Mortlake and his parents were George and Elizabeth. We are not sure when George was born as the evidence is conflicting, but probably between 1788 and 1796 in Hertfordshire.
Having just finished writing the above, a letter from Neil Haggar in Melbourne, Australia
dated 1986 came to light. In the letter Neil mentions this very family as two of
Arthur (seniors) siblings emigrated to Australia and Neil is descended from one of
these -
If you know any more about this branch of the Hagger’s please contact Peter Hagger who would be delighted to fill some of the gaps.
Harold Hagger
One of our own relatives who can only be described as infamous is Harold Hagger, who died at the gallows at Wandsworth Prison in 1947, having been convicted at Kent Assizes of the murder of Dagmar Perzywalski, aged 48. The case was investigated by one of England’s most famous detectives Fabian of the yard and took place at Wrotham in Kent.
Harold had a criminal record going back a good number of years and was once known as ‘Basher Hagger’. There are lots of interesting bits in his story and although his death certificate is in the name of Harold Hagger he was tried under the name Sidney Sinclair, a name that first cropped up when he bigamously married his second wife, Daisy Oakley, in 1940.
Harold was one of fourteen children of William Hagger and Annie Bullard. Harold
was born in 1901 at Holloway, his parents having been married in 1892 at West Ham.
However, William and Annie were both born in Therfield -
Hopefully, we will soon compile a page all about Harold on our Ancestors part of the web site.
DNA Project
As you will see from our DNA results page we now have ten participants in our project and the results suggest nine of these are related. The nine that are related all have ancestors from Hertfordshire or Essex. However, we need more male Hagger participants before we can draw any real conclusions.
So if you are a male Hagg*r or know a male Hagg*r please contact Peter Hagger who would be pleased to explain what is involved. Basically you take the sample yourself just wiping a swab in you mouth and the DNA tested is commonly referred to as ‘Junk DNA’ or a Y DNA test. It is painless and cannot be used for medical purposes or to identify an individual, but can give an indication that two males are related down their male line.