OTHER LYTLES

There is a vast nursery garden business near Liverpool whose proprietor is called Lytle. There was a doctor in Nottingham in 1915 and later in Portsmouth another doctor named Lytle, who attended my younger brother and his family professionally after the Second World War in 1948-55. There was a young woman in Paddington called Jane Lytle, found in 1982.

Another coincidence on the name occurred in 1937. I lived in a village in the beautiful Belvoir Vale after marriage, and when my first child Rosalind, was born, the vicar of the parish church noted the family name on the certificate. It was revealed that our vicar had left the city of Liverpool to take up this country parish a few years before. While working for the Mission he had worked with Arthur Lytle as a missioner and revered him greatly, calling him an ‘auburn haired Saint’. He really was a red haired saintly man. This wee Church of England clergyman was unusual, by birth, he was an Armenian, a Jew, and a British trained missionary, married to an English girl and he opened a mission station in Morocco. When he was about 55 years old, he was offered the Liverpool post and then the Kinoulton village vicarage and church. His vicarage housed several fleeing Jews from Germany and Austria during the persecutions 1936 – 1945. He died in our village about the end of the War. We knew him and his wife well.

We have traced some other Lytles, living in America, who seem to be connected to John Lytle Sr (1799-1877). A Joseph Lytle, seems to be John’s nephew, and son of a brother who emigrated to the US in about 1826 – 1829.

Joseph’s daughter, Isabel J. (1885-1933) was mentioned in the 1891 Census.

There is also a niece, Joanna Lytle (1869 – 1951), mentioned in the 1891 Census. This must be the Joanna who Family Researchers Ltd were trying to trace in 1979. So she was a distant relative of the Lytles of Liverpool, after all.

In 1979 ‘Family Researchers Ltd’ wrote to both Edward Lytle and his cousin John Lytle, asking if they knew of two Lytle sisters: Miss Johanna Lytle who had died in 1951 aged 81 years and Isabella Jane Brown Lytle, who had died in 1933, to see if they were related. They were trying to ascertain the entitlement to some Trust Funds. The sisters were daughters of John Lytle, a wholesale grain merchant of Liverpool. It was thought they might have been sisters of the three orphans, John, Edward Arthur and Alfred Lytle, as they were all born in the 1860’s and 70’s. However, none of the orphans remember having sisters, and these names do not turn up in the Lytle documents that we have researched.

This John Lytle, is maybe the same man who turns up again, in Ruth’s story of her friend Miss Walls.

Edward Lytle replied to Family Researchers that the present Lytle family had no knowledge of Johanna and Isabella. This enquiry must have piqued Edward’s interest in his family, because he then carried out extensive research of his own on the family, transcribing birth and marriage certificates and attempting to write a Family Tree. He and his cousin John talked about their shared handed-down memories, and his notes were passed down the family.