Notes I never knew my grandfather?Thomas Edward Byatt, he died when I was about 3 years old. What I know comes from family stories from my mother, his next to youngest child. It seems he was a pretty private man, since few of his children seemed to recall him saying much about his childhood. No one knows, for instance, where in England he was born, whether he was truly an orphan, or anything about his family of origin.
He told his family that he was born in ~1873/1874 and brought to Canada when he was around 6 to be adopted by family in Canada. This corresponds with the Thomas Edward Byatt who travelled to Canada in 1880 as a child from the Middlemore Homes. He ran away from this family as a teenager to the United States?my mother never knew the name of the Canada family but knew he grew up in Southern Ontario province.
His first records in the United States occur when he was in the US Navy in 1894; by that time his surname was spelled ?Byitte.? In 1898 he married my grandmother Lillian Herald and shows up in Brooklyn NY census records as living next door to his in-laws. They had 8 children who survived to adulthood: John, Eleanor, Harold, Louis, Herbert, Mary, Doris, and Edna. He lived the rest of his life in Brooklyn New York, worked as a postman, and died in 1953. My mother was Doris Esther (Byitte) Franz. She was born in 1923, married David Franz, had 4 children (Paul, Carol, Calvin, and Rebecca) and died in 1999. Only Edna (Marcantonio) still survives.
Contributors Created : 2012-10-08 20:25:31 / From original database Last Updated : 2012-10-19 11:35:33 /
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