Looking for him yet again is giving me a stinking headache so I thought I'd post him here for anyone's thoughts.
I’m trying to unravel the mystery of my 3xgt grandmother’s invisible husband.
Elizabeth HAMLEY married William ROBBINS 15 Sept 1870 in Treneglos, Cornwall. On the 1871 census, Elizabeth is in her brother’s household in Tremaine, oddly under her maiden name although written as married, with her daughter Mary Ann ROBINS 1870, whose christening I haven’t found (I suspect she was born as Mary Ann Robins HAMLEY). She has two further ROBBINS children (found the christening of the second but not the third) and is without her husband on every census, living in Launceston 1881 onwards (1881 is “farmer’s wife” and then thereafter she is a laundress). Her 1911 says she is married but she gets her years of marriage wrong and appears to count her first illegitimate child as a child of the marriage. She dies in 1919 as “widow of William ROBBINS” but it was delivered by coroner after inquest so it is possible that someone got it wrong. If it weren’t for the marriage, I might have suspected she’d just made up a husband.
After discounting another William who was with a wife on census, I’ve found a curious character in the form of William ROBINS 1844, son of John (father’s name and occupation correct as marriage). He is with his parents on the 1871 in Treneglos, a married man with no wife or children. Subsequently he stays in the Treneglos area living as a married man with his unmarried sister Caroline, but no wife or children. On the 1911, it originally says married for 40 years with three children (which would fit), but this has been crossed out and “widower” written above; it might be in a different hand but I can’t tell. He dies late 1919, after Elizabeth’s date of death.
Has anyone got any thoughts on how I might pin down this man as "mine" or else give me an excuse to throw him out of the window!
