Alice Elizabeth Tull

Alice Palmer, Walter’s mother, was born in Hougham. Census returns, church registers and local newspapers help to tell the story.
Alice Elizabeth Palmer was born at Elms Farm, at the end of Elms Vale Road on 19 March 1853 to Stephen and Sarah Palmer. She was baptised at St Lawrence Church in Hougham, where her father had also been baptised in 1813. Walter’s step-mother, Clara Palmer, Alice’s niece, was baptised here too, in 1870.
Walter’s grandparents and great-grandparents are buried here. Members of the Palmer family have been baptised and buried at St Lawrence since the 1650s.
The family is shown on the 1871 census as living at West End Farm in Hougham and shows Alice as having two brothers at this time, Richard, who was four years older, and John, two years her junior.
In 1891 Stephen and Sarah, Walter’s grandparents, are recorded as still living in Hougham, at Young’s Cottages.
Census records for 7 April 1861, show that the future mother of Walter Tull, Alice Palmer, then aged 8, and her brother Richard, were staying with their maternal grandmother, Elizabeth,in Cheriton Street. Elizabeth was then aged 63, and was married for a second time to Richard Smissen, a Farm Bailiff.
Daniel Tull and Alice Palmer were married in the Grace Hill Wesleyan Chapel in Folkestone on 25 February 1880. The extract from the marriage certificate shows them residing at 14 Darby Road and 18 Foord Road respectively. Early in their marriage the Tulls suffered the loss of their first child, Bertha, who died in March 1881 aged just 5 weeks. The funeral service was conducted by Mr Moorehouse Thorpe, the same minister who had married her parents the previous year.
The Tulls moved house a number of times as their family grew. Their first son, William Stephen Palmer Tull, was born at 8 Allendale Street, a style of building known as a Monkey Puzzle house because one frontage is for two homes and internally they fit together like a 3D wooden puzzle.
The Tull family worshipped at the Grace Hill Wesleyan Chapel. It was here that family members were baptised and married. When Alice Tull became ill, the church granted sums of money to her husband, Daniel. Daniel’s second wife was also granted assistance of £1 in the weeks following his death. The chapel was demolished after a new church was opened in 1976 and the site is now Grace Court, a home for elderly people.
In 1895 the family was living at 51 Walton Road and it was here that Alice Tull died on 14 April, at the age of 42, from breast cancer. Walter’s father, Daniel, was with her when she died.

"Walter Tull’s Family History in Dover and Folkestone", The Dover War Memorial Project

Birth registration

England, Kent, Canterbury Parish Registers, 1538-1986

• Name: Alice Elizabeth Palmer
• Event Type: Baptism
• Event Date: 24 Apr 1853
• Event Place: Hougham, Kent, England, United Kingdom
• Event Place (Original): Hougham, St Lawrence, Kent
• Birth Date: 19 Mar 1853
• Father's Name: Stephen
• Mother's Name: Sarah Ann

  ---

  
  

Census:

• 1861, with maternal grandmother (who had remarried) and brother
• 1871
• 1881
• 1891

  ---

  
  

Death registration

Find a Grave