Ruth unfolded a sheet of paper at our table in the Harbour Hotel. She had drawn her family tree by hand. I opened the same branch on my iPad, and we began comparing names.
We had met less than an hour before.
Ruth’s grandfather, Fred Septimus Cleaver, and my Nana’s grandfather, Joseph Lucas Cleaver, were brothers. Joseph left Bath for Canada and began using Lucas as his surname. Fred’s branch remained in England and retained the Cleaver name.
More than a century after the brothers went their separate ways, their descendants had met for lunch in Padstow.
The Cleavers of Bath
The earliest generations of the Cleaver family I have traced lived in Barby, Northamptonshire. William Cleaver and his wife, Anne Lucas, later made their home in the Walcot area of Bath.
William worked as a postman for thirty-two years. Records from Anne’s younger years describe her as a bookbinder. The couple had eight children over fifteen years, including Joseph Lucas Cleaver and their youngest son, Fred Septimus Cleaver.
Joseph was born in Bath in 1863. His middle name came from his mother’s family, but it would become the surname used by his descendants in Canada.
Fred’s branch of the family
Joseph’s youngest brother, Fred Septimus Cleaver, remained in England.
Fred married Florence Annie White in Newton Abbot when he was twenty-nine. They had three children: Florence Lucy Louise, Kathleen Theodora Mary and Eric Leonard Fred Cleaver.
Eric married Doris Cook. Their children were Mike and Ruth.
My research into Fred’s family led me to Mike on Facebook almost ten years ago. We stayed in contact, although meeting seemed unlikely because he lived in Australia.
That changed while I was planning my trip to Cornwall. Mike told me that Ruth lived there.
Ruth’s grandfather and my Nana’s grandfather were brothers. I sent her a message, and we arranged to meet.
Lunch in Padstow
I drove from Penzance to Padstow on Tuesday, 9 January 2024. The journey took about an hour, and I reached the Harbour Hotel in time for lunch.
The hotel sits above the town with views across the harbour and the River Camel. Its cream façade and palm trees suggested warmer weather, but the cold wind outside made it clear that I was in Cornwall in January.
Inside, the words to “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?” appeared on the wall.
Ruth and her husband, Paul, had found a table overlooking the water. When I hugged Ruth, I thought of Nana. Ruth and Nana belonged to the same generation of the family, and I could see something familiar in her.
We began talking before we sat down.
Lunch gave us time to learn about one another’s families. Ruth and Paul told me about their children and grandchildren. I shared what I knew about the Lucas branch in Canada and how Joseph’s change of surname had shaped our side of the family.
Then Ruth brought out her handwritten tree.
I opened my Ancestry tree on the iPad. We laughed at our different methods, but the names matched. Her sheet of paper made the relationships easy to see. My digital tree gave us access to the records and dates behind them.
For the next two hours, we worked through the Cleaver family from William and Anne in Bath to the descendants who grew up in Britain, Canada and Australia. We compared what each branch remembered and identified some of the gaps that remained.
In Montreal, my branch had grown up under the Lucas name. Ruth’s family had continued as Cleavers. The connection between us became easier to follow once we returned to Joseph and Fred.
Before leaving, we took photographs together and continued talking on the way to the car park. We had covered about a century of family history over lunch, but we had more to exchange.
I left Padstow with new photographs and plans to see Ruth and Paul again. A search for Joseph’s youngest brother had led me back to a living branch of the Cleaver family.
