Scenteraina was baptised at Church Gresley in Derbyshire at the end of November 1901, the daughter of Thomas Holland and his wife, Violet Annie, formerly Haywood. Her parents had married in Burton on Trent, Staffordshire in 1896 and can be found in the 1911 census in Derbyshire, with children Thomas Henry, William Lewis, Sennie, Phyllis, Doreen and Miriam.
Ten years later, still in Derbyshire, Thomas and Violet Annie, together with their last three daughters, also have a granddaughter, Verdun Holland, about 5 years of age, living with them; she is almost certainly the daughter of the younger Thomas and his wife, Edith.
Thomas Holland was descended from a significant Gypsy family, a son of Isaiah Holland and Matilda Sherriff, and grandson of Benjamin Holland and Sibirani Smith, he was baptised at Edingale, Staffordshire, on 4th November 1877, ‘Gypsy.’ In 1939 he and his wife were living at Warner’s Yard, Bedworth, in Warwickshire and Thomas was working as a cutlery grinder.
Their daughter Scenteraina/Sennie seems to disappear following the 1911 census, but actually she is close by, also living at Warner’s Yard, with her husband. When she was baptised at the end of 1901, she was also recorded in the civil records, listing her mother’s maiden name as Haywood, and here she was named, rather more prosaically, as Mary Ann Tracey Holland. Further confusion for those researching this family has arisen because the 1939 records give Mary Ann Tracey’s birth year as 1900, so that it seems she is Scenteraina’s elder sister, but whoever offered this information was clearly incorrect – Mary Ann Tracey Holland, mother formerly Haywood, was recorded the following year.
In 1919 Mary Ann Tracey married her first cousin, Everett Holland, a son of Thomas Holland’s brother, Isaiah, and his wife, Sophia Smith. The brothers had often travelled together, baptising their children in the same locations; in fact Isaiah and Sophia baptised a daughter, Lily, in the same year and in the same place as Thomas and Violet baptised Scenteraina. So far from disappearing from the records Scenteraina married into her extended family, and remained living close to her parents.
She is also living at Warner’s Yard in 1939, with two of her children, Violet and Douglas Everett, close by her parents and her husband, Everett, is working at an iron foundry furnace. He died in 1964, when he was about 67 years of age, leaving Mary Ann Tracey a widow, and so she remained for some eight years. In 1972 she married again, a local man named Ernest Crutchlow, also widowed, who was born in 1904, but their marriage was to last only five years, as he, too, then died, aged around 73. Mary Ann Tracey, however, lived a long life, recorded over time with two distinct forenames and two surnames, she finally died in the district of Nuneaton and Bedworth, Warwickshire, in 1987.