EBLS Notes

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]

These are notes written towards the end of her life by Elizabeth Beatrice Leslie Watson (1871-1957), known as Ellie, who married Charles Condon Swetenham (1864-1940) and had a son Clement Alfred Swetenham MC RE (1906-1983) who was a Regular officer in the Royal Engineers, married and has living children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and a daughter Leslie Mary Swetenham (1909-1993) who never married. She was active on Bournemouth County Borough Council, and was a former Mayor.

Ellie gives details of her family and details of places of residence and wanderings before and after her marriage.

The details she gives of her mother's family, the Morphys, are not exact - she states that her maternal grandfather Francis Morphy was brother of the Conde de Morphy, private secretary of King Alfonso XII of Spain. This is not true.

There were two Morphy families, the Murphys of Waterford (family of the Conde) and of Cork (family of Francis) who were both Irish in origin and were prosperous Catholic merchants who left Ireland for Spain because of religious discrimination.

The Waterford family is well documented both in Ireland and in Spain. There is no documentary evidence of a blood tie in the male line with the Murphys of Cork. However all descendants of the two lines are cousins, because representatives of the Murphys of Waterford and of the Murphys of Cork married two Porro sisters, whose prosperous family of merchants originally came from Genoa. Both marriages took place in Gibraltar in the mid-18th century.