A resident of Essex in England is on the island to learn more about the Bermudian grandfather she never knew.

On August 25, 1929, Janet McGready’s grandfather, Wentford Outerbridge, walked into a cake shop near his adopted home in Great Waltham, Essex, and collapsed, dead.

The sudden loss of the 32-year-old was so unusual that it made the local papers. Police tore up the Outerbridge home looking for poison.

An autopsy determined that Mr Outerbridge died because of heart compression after the sac around his heart filled with blood.

Mr Outerbridge had been married to his wife, Lucy, for less than five years when he died. They had three very young children — Lillian, Amy and Charles — and were expecting another in February 1930.

His absence left a gaping hole in the family that is still felt today.

“I always knew that he died really young when my mum, Amy, was a toddler,” Mrs McGready said. “When he died, my grandmother was pregnant with their fourth child, John.”

Mrs Outerbridge struggled so much financially after Mr Outerbridge died that their son, John, was born in a workhouse. She was made to scrub floors only days before the baby arrived.

Workhouses, written about by novelists such as Charles Dickens, were institutions that took in poor people in the community, often attempting to reform them by putting them to work at harsh manual, repetitive labour. Workhouses were often crowded with poor sanitation. Children were often beaten.

Years later, Mrs Outerbridge never talked about her late husband.

“It was probably too painful for her,” Mrs McGready said. “My mother, Amy, was just a toddler when he died so had very little memory of him.”

There is a memory in the family of someone, a woman, sending care packages from Bermuda to help Lucy Outerbridge and her family in England.

Mrs McGready once asked her aunt Lillian why her grandfather had come to England.

“Auntie Lilly was in her nineties at that point,” Mrs McGready said. “She said he came to see the world. She said Bermuda was so small — what was there for him?”

While here with her husband, Chris, Mrs McGready has spent many hours at the Bermuda Archives researching her family. With some help from the local genealogy community, a picture of her grandfather’s life is emerging.

Mr Outerbridge was born in Sandys in 1897 to Louisa Outerbridge, a laundress. His father was not listed on his birth certificate or baptism, but is sometimes given as Henry Cox Outerbridge. His parents were not married to each other. On his wedding certificate, his father was given as a sergeant major in the army.

Louisa’s mother, Bridget Outerbridge, died a few years before Mr Outerbridge was born, but Louisa’s grandmother, Rebecca Virgin Outerbridge, reported Wentford Outerbridge’s birth to the Registry General.

Mr Outerbridge had two older brothers, James Edgar Outerbridge, born in 1892, and Ernest Henry Raymond Outerbridge, born in 1895. A younger sister, Lillian, was born in 1901, but died at nine months old from enteritis, inflammation of the intestines.

“My grandfather named his oldest daughter Lillian,” Mrs McGready said.

This is not the family’s first foray into their Bermuda roots. Thirty years ago, one of Mrs McGready’s cousins came to Bermuda to learn more about their grandfather. The cousin published a letter in The Royal Gazette asking whether anyone remembered Mr Outerbridge.

The cousin received a letter from a Sandys resident, Janetta Grant, saying she remembered Mr Outerbridge. Through the letter, the family learnt that Wentford had been called “Wenty” by his friends, and had been the foster child of Ms Grant’s mother, Adella Grant, a nurse. The Grants, from Cooks Hill, Sandys, were Jamaicans who had come to Bermuda in the 1890s to work at Dockyard. Ms Grant remembered that Mr Outerbridge’s mother had married late in life to a Burns.

More recently, Mr Outerbridge’s descendants took to a more modern platform to learn more about their heritage. A DNA test revealed a connection to Bermudian Liana Nanang Omodele, daughter of the late Julian Hall.

While visiting Bermuda, Mrs McGready has enjoyed getting to know her.

“I feel that we have so much in common,” she said. “We have similar interests.”

Meeting Liana and talking to people has helped to fill a void.

They are not sure exactly how they are related, but believe it goes back before emancipation. They have been to the Bermuda Archives together to research, and suspect that Mrs McGready’s ancestor, Rebecca Virgin Outerbridge, was the daughter of Rachel and Dick Virgin, who were enslaved by Jeremiah Burrows in the 1820s. The Burrowses lived on Wreck Hill in Sandys. Ms Nanang Omodele’s ancestor, Isaac Virgin, was possibly Rebecca’s brother.

Mrs McGready called the trip to Bermuda a “whirlwind”.

Friends took Ms McGready on a tour of Sandys Parish, showing her places such as Cooks Hill, where her grandfather once lived with his foster family, and to St James Church, where he was baptised.

“By coming here I have learnt so much more,” she said. “Actually going to the very road where he would have lived, and the church that he was probably dragged to, was very moving. Another lovely thing has been connecting to the people here. Even though Liana is the only member of my family I know of here, it feels like my family have gotten bigger.”

Mrs McGready said staff at the Bermuda Archives have been extremely helpful.

“Being in Bermuda also makes me feel the pain that some of my ancestors would have gone through,” she said. “I had this realisation that Mary Prince [author of the enslavement narrative The History of Mary Prince] was a contemporary of the people we are trying to find.”

With further investigation, Mrs McGready learnt that her grandfather’s mother, Louisa, her great-grandmother, married Henry Austin Burns when Wentford was about 18.

At 22, Mr Outerbridge took to the sea, sailing as crew on ships such as Fort Victoria and the Adriatic, to New York, New Orleans and Southampton, England, before settling in Essex.

Now, Mrs McGready is hoping to find relatives of her grandfather, perhaps the descendants of his brothers, James and Ernest Outerbridge.

• To contact Janet McGready, e-mail janet.mcgready@aol.co.uk