Fantastic thanks very much for all the assistance (it was interesting to read all the previous posts on this branch of the family... I have actually made a fair bit of progress thanks to the kind souls of RootsChat!)
I will go through the various points in one msge:
1) I have the marriage printouts, not the marriage certs. I can’t see anything on the doc(s) that indicates an annulment or divorce (decree absolute)! That is one major issue Lu -----since she remarried twice after the Morris marriage!!!
2) After the Godden marriage and supposed subsequent annulment, Emma Jane remarried a Thomas Jackson Pinkney in 1899 (that marriage listed her as Emma Godden). I wonder if the annulment to Morris would have listed her as Emma Godden (not Emma Jane Oakley)??
3) I have obtained the base information for these folks from my (93-year-old) Aunt whose memory has been extremely accurate so far.
4) Marriages for Emma Jane
1886/475 Emma Jane Oakley Henry Morris
1888/2289 Emma Jane Oakly Julian Henry Godden
1899/587 Emma Godden Thomas Jackson
5) Re John Henry Wilkes...Emma Jane was pregnant with Wilkes’ daughter Ellen May (Wilkes). She and Wilkes never married (I think he was friends with Morris –both from Liverpool). Morris offered, or was paid, to marry Emma Jane so the child wouldn’t be born illegitimate. Wilkes completely disappears off the scene – I suspect he returned to England and possibly married an Elizabeth Pugh(?)
6) John - it’s certainly possible that my aunt mixed up the names of Ellen May’s benefactor and it was her birth father who left her something. But she is of the opinion that Henry Morris genuinely cared for Emma Jane and her daughter so she believes he was the one who bequeathed Ellen.
7) Sue- Henry Morris was listed as a labourer on the wedding cert. I have no further knowledge of him after that.
Emma Jane had one child (Ellen May) before marrying Pinkney with whom she had several children.
As a final note: Emma Jane was an habitual liar…even on the first marriage cert she lists her birthplace as Liverpool. She was in fact born in Kangaroo Flat, Bendigo, (Victoria) Australia. However, she did list her parents correctly. She could read and write and was fairly well educated actually, so she would have known if it was an error on the doc.
On her daughter’s birth cert (in Dunedin) she claimed to be married to Wilkes in Wellington on 2nd October 1885. Completely untrue -her first marriage was to Morris in 1886 when she was 5 months pregnant with Wilkes' child.
She left Morris and remarried Julian Godden who was apparently related to a family of influence in England (this part is a bit fuzzy but he was done for embezzlement possibly in England at some point– according to my Aunt). My Aunt said the marriage had been annulled because she was still married to Morris – this seems to be quite a well-known fact in the family at the time.
Ultimately – my goal is to locate Henry Morris and/or John Henry Wilkes to determine which of them left Ellen May an estate because I am hoping the probate doc will lead me to where they ended up.
Honestly – I feel like my head is going to explode every time I try to research Emma Jane’s life
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Topic: Divorce Records (Read 4817 times)