Benson Stafford Furby's Notes (038)
Last Updated : 6 Mar 2009
25th November 2004
My grandfather was George Frederick Furby (born at Eastborne, England about 1854) and was the brother of William Stafford Furby.
The first Furby the family knew of had been an officer in the garrison at Gibraltar. He is supposed to have come from Yorkshire. My Uncle Ted Furby, a marine engineer, left the Merchant Navy about 1916/17 and was commissioned in the Royal Naval Reserve (That was the one for professional merchant seamen. The Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve was for amateurs). In London in WW-I he looked up our ancestor at the War Office. The ancestor had been a sergeant at Gibraltar, and he deserted from the army.
There were apparently two Furbys (in our line of descent), living on London Bridge (the original had houses all along it). These two were journalists. The next one we know of was Secretary at the Bank of England, and signed all the banknotes. Probably around the Napoleonic period. I think it was his son who married the last of the true line of the Staffords. Because the Duke of Buckingham was skint after the Civil War (mid 1660s), King Charles approved the title being sold to a cousin. See "Stafford", in the Encyclopedia Britannica of the 1950s. This attempt to get the title back failed.
My grandfather who was born, in Eastbourne, was taken to Christchurch, New Zealand, aged about two. Grandfather had four sons, Frederick (1880), George Victor (1881), William Stafford, and Edward Stafford (the marine engineer). Uncle Fred had one son (Alan Stafford), who had one daughter. William Stafford, had none. Uncle Ted had two: a son, Edward, who went to England to take up a career on the stage, and a daughter who married an American Marine in WW-II and moved to Hollywood.
Father had 6 children, 3 girls, 3 boys. The first born, Ellen, died three days after birth by an accident. George Alfred was born 1910, had twin daughters and who are now grandmothers themselves. Joan Leslie, b. 1912, two sons , one daughter. The daughter, Judy Gibbard, has one son (Reid), and the family spends a lot of time in the USA. Joan's eldest ( son) has several children, and grandchildren. Margaret Ellen never married, and she had her 88th birthday at Auckland 10 days ago. The 2nd to last brother, Edward Stafford, had three sons and an adopted daughter by his first marriage, and a son and a daughter by his second marriage. He was 8 years older than I, but died early, at 72.
It was family lore that if a generation was usually four generations/century, the Furbys were three generations/century. Uncle Ted (the marine engineer) used to correspond with a Miss Furby, a retired school headmistress in the UK, whom I met when I was in there in 1952/54. She was very nice, and had looked for our ancestry back beyond the army sergeant. Family lore was that he had come from Yorkshire. She finally tracked Thomas Furby, born 1514, in a church registry, in a corner of Yorkshire, and a whole line of Furbys. Unfortunately, when I moved to Australia in 1977, the papers I had left behind were lost.