Tom McCabe's Genealogy 2025

LETTER from Wm Still in 1849 to Ann PORTER Colley mentions Jack PORTER ... Assume this is brother or father of Ann.

Birth record for Ann PORTER found in index of church records Frensham, Surrey in Soc of Gen library, SR/R47. Same index lists births of other children of James Porter.

A couple of months after being promoted to Sergeant, Frederick Summers married Ann PORTER (reputed to be a barmaid) in the Parish of Broadway in the County of Dorset, on the 28th of August 1805. She was one of only 6 women who were allowed to travel with her husband in the Army. And travel she did. She had her first child 2 Oct 1806 in Sicilly and buried him \"on the banks of the Nile\" when he was not even one year old. (September 1807) Their second child, Ann Priscilla SUMMERS, was born 21 Nov 1812 in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. In a letter from Dora COOKSEY Roberts,( a granddaughter of Ann Priscilla SUMMERS) written in 1928, she states that Ann Priscilla and her mother \" were stationed so near that they heard the guns of Waterloo... Frederick SUMMERS lived not many years after this, but she has no record of the exact date of his death, but he died when little Priscilla was yet a small child\".

According to family oral tradition, \"feeling that her little daughter should be given better advantages in education than she would be able to give her, Ann (the barmaid) decided to try for the child's sake to get her fathers people to help her. However, when she went to see them they refused to see her, so there was nothing for her to do but raise her daughter herself the best that she could. Little Ann Priscilla grew to be a woman and I am told a woman of unusually brilliant mind for her chances. She seemed to have inherited the SUMMERS brain rather than her mother beauty.\"

Ann PORTER Summers later married a man by the name of COLLEY. When or where is not known, only that in the 1851 Census both she and her daughter, Ann Priscillia SUMMERS Still are both left widows. On the 8th of September 1857 she and her daughter and 6 grandchildren arrived in New York on the Ship Palestine. They traveled from London with 204 other passengers, mostly from England.

Ann PORTER Summers Colley died 3 Sept. 1862 at the age of 80. She is buried in the Asbury Cemetery in Warrick County, Indiana. Her grave is unmarked.

Recent research has revealed more information about Frederic Summers and his wife Ann Porter. We had known that, after the Battle of Waterloo, Frederick left the 35th Regiment of Foot when they returned in 1816. We had no further information on him after that except that a family story (written in Indiana some 80 years later) said that he had died soon after. Newly discovered records from Edinburgh Scotland and from Muster Books in the British archives show that circa 1818 Frederick rejoined the British Army in the 13th Regiment, not the 35th. The 13th was stationed in the Channel Island of Guernsey and I conjecture Frederick and his wife Ann Porter wanted to return to Army life in Guernsey where they had lived in 1812 when their daughter Ann Priscilla was born. But the records show that the 13th was transferred to Scotland in 1819 to suppress an uprising of Glasgow factory workers and Frederick died sometime around October 1820. Now we have discovered that Ann immediately remarried another soldier from the 13th - John Stinner. I haven't been able to find the outcome of this marriage; the 13th Regiment was sent to Nepal in 1822 but I don't know if Stinner and Ann went with them. It's possible she did: Ann had been an army wife and followed Frederick from post to post, battles and all, for 15 years. Added: Research has shown that Stinner must have died because Ann married for the third time to a man named Samuel Groves, in London in 1823. However Groves died by 1826 whereas Ann married her fourth and final husband Charles Colley, 24 Dec 1826, in the London borough of Southwark.