The Endicott Connection
About five years ago I got a message through Ancestry.com from a member known as “Heatherbelle” who was working on the family trees of some of the prominent Hong Kong families of the 19th century. She asked if I had any relationship to the Endicott family from Danvers, Massachusetts. At the time I had no knowledge of any such connections and I replied as such.
We did however exchange invitations to our respective family trees so we both had access and I spent quite some time looking at her Hong Kong Families tree. It’s large and covers quite a number of families including Ho, and Li, as well as many Eurasian off-shoots. As I was looking for my own family, I didn’t spend much time looking at the Endicott side. While there were quite a few living and doing business in Hong Kong and Shanghai, the family seemed to mainly from the USA and their roots were there.
About this time I’d come across a letter that mentioned an inheritance that was due to be paid to my mother and her sister back in 1939. The money was from the sale of a property in Hong Kong, that had been owned by a “Kot Choy” The address was 4 Moreton Terrace, Hong Kong. I mentioned this to Heatherbelle and she told me I could check with the Hong Kong Land Registry and they would likely still have the file. As this semed well above my pay grade, I asked if she could walk me through the process. So, one evening we connected through Skype and she showed me how to access the records. There was a fee to be paid to the HK Registry which I paid with my card on-line. The file came up and I was able to view and download it. Her help was instrumental in my learning the identity of “Kot Choy” but I’ll leave that for the moment.
So, back to the Endicotts. As is my habit, I often go back over documents that I’ve studied many times before, in hope of finding something I’d missed. I happened to be looking at old ship’s passenger lists and I found on showing my mother’s uncle, Tom Cock, on a passage from China to the UK via the USA in 1920. He planned a stop to visit his sister as shown on line 1, row 19, “Mary Endicott” The passenger list is pictured below. The visit looks like it may have been scrubbed, but the intent and name is recorded.
Then in May of 1936, a similar passage was made by Thomas Cock’s son Alwyn Leyland ( he had changed his name by then ) from Shanghai to the UK aboard the SS President Hoover via the USA. On the passenger manifest, he shows a planned stopover in Philadelphia to visit his cousin, H.B. Endicott ( Henry Bridges Endicott ) see Line 1, Row 23. This is the same address as listed on his father’s visit 16 years earlier. As can be seen, the addresses are the same.
It turns out this is only the tip of the Endicott iceberg. I’m uncovering ever more interesting links between this family and not only the Cocks, but possibly my own Hunter side as well. I will elaborate on this in future posts as new information is coming in almost every day now.