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General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: coombs on Monday 12 June 23 21:25 BST (UK)
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I am sure we will have come across instances of direct ancestors, their siblings and cousins etc who appear to never have married. I guess it is easier to find this out if they were supposed to have married after civil reg began. I have a couple (ancestors brother married ancestor's sister) who claimed to have married in about 1902 according to the 1911 census, but no marriage has been found, and the groom had a rare forename. All variants and the like have been checked.
Of course this will apply to couples who seemed to have married before civil registration, however I doubt all the 1754-1837 marriages that took place in the UK are all indexed and put online now or indexed by FH societies etc, so this could explain an absence of a marriage. Also there will be a few 1754-1837 marriage registers that have not survived.
I guess some were reluctant to get married for religious reasons or other reasons. I have a few instances of a banns being read but no known marriage yet the couple stayed together according to later documents and the woman took the man's surname.
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I would imagine there were some cases where a child was due and rather than marry due to there being pressures on the couple they chose to just move away and start their family as though they were already married. My great, great grandparents left Ireland without marrying and they never ever married.
Blue
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I would imagine there were some cases where a child was due and rather than marry due to there being pressures on the couple they chose to just move away and start their family as though they were already married. My great, great grandparents left Ireland without marrying and they never ever married.
Blue
That as well. I have a couple who were in London by 1812 when their first child was born, and the husband was from South West England, and his wife may have been. So far I cannot find a likely marriage but never say never. I have spent 20 years on their marriage. If they did marry I doubt it was in London.
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My great-great grandmother had my great-grandfather in 1862 in Sussex, a second illegitimate child a couple of years later and next turns up in Lambeth with a partner with whom she had seven children. My great grandfather remained in Sussex with her mother.
I have no idea why she didn’t marry Thomas Jeff, who was widowed as a young man. Her name, Mary Message Oliver (Message is a surname in her family but she was legitimate) was unusual enough and in records she often included Message.
They stayed together until Thomas died and then she went to Wales to live with a daughter. Almost gave up finding her back in the day before the BMDs went online, she lived into her 90’s and I had no idea she went to Wales!
Just to add, the children went by the surname Jeff and were registered that way.
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The groom of the couple who I mentioned in my first post who "married" circa 1802 was Sylvanus. So a rare forename so should have made it easier but it looks like they never walked down the aisle but remained a couple.
I guess if for example a couple from rural Suffolk moved to London to start a new life, or they had a baby on the way just claimed to be wed once they left their family parish and no one would be any the wiser.
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There is always the obvious reason - that one of them was married before ;D ;D
Surprising how many were, and divorce was expensive. What surprises me was that their old spouse may even be resident in the same town!
And then there's the one's who wanted to marry their brother / sister-in-law after their spouses death. That was illegal until after WW1.
I saw one who did this - he was a local solicitor. They must have gone away for a while, and he put a notice in the paper,
"Saturday 01 July 1843
At Southampton, in November last, and subsequently in Scotland, Mr J H Sheppard of Towcester to Miss Sarah Gee"
No such marriage has been found!
The other people who may not have bothered were Romanies. Mostly they did, but not always!
The second marriages sometimes did take place - somewhere they weren't known. Or took place years later. One man I found was living under an assumed name, with his new "wife", whom he had married - until he wanted to claim his Old Age Pension, which he had to do under his real name. The authorities promptly took him to court for bigamy, but the judge let him off with just the two days he'd already served on remand.
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There is always the obvious reason - that one of them was married before ;D ;D
They may have wed under the wife's previously married name.
But if one was married before and widowed, I don't see how that would impede a subsequent marriage.
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There is always the obvious reason - that one of them was married before ;D ;D
They may have wed under the wife's previously married name.
But if one was married before and widowed, I don't see how that would impede a subsequent marriage.
This is why I don't understand why Thomas Jeff and Mary Message Oliver did not marry as his first wife had died before they likely even met.
On the 1921 census Mary has recorded they were married 46 years and had had 8 children. This is incorrect, so likely they had just told people they were married and they never got around to it. They had seven children together, but her second illegitimate child, according to a descendant of hers, was brought up by Thomas and he was a very good father to her, but she was not his child. My great-grandfather William was not included in the list of 8 children - he was Mary's first and by DNA, not connected to the Jeff side.
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I have a couple of chaps who married the dead wife's sister. However they did not marry close to home, but wandered 20+ miles to Liverpool, then returned.
In another case, the only clue that it was the dead wife's sister came from the brides' father's name and occupation. All had been married before - this was to be the third spouse for both parties, though she forgot to mention husband number two completely!
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Children baptized to seemingly married parents appear to have been more common in populous London parishes. The baptism entry sometimes reads as if they were married, the only difference being that they weren't. This can be done with a view to maintaining a respectable appearance. They would be less likely to get away with this in a smaller parish, where people are recognized.
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Two sets of my great-grandparents never married - to each other that is.
One great-grandmother was married twice, but failed to marry my great-grandfather. He failed to marry either of his "wives" but his own parents did not set a good example. They were baptising children for 16 years before they decided to make the relationship official. I don't understand why they did not marry - both were free to do so. Her first husband was dead, as was his first 'wife.' I can only think that he was not a fan of the church.
The other couple did not marry, since my great-grandmother was already married, but to a man who committed a crime which probably made her a pariah within her wider family. They moved from one side of London to the other and kept the situation hidden, although there were a few suspicions. It's taken a long time to prove those suspicions - and it was newspaper reports that helped to unravel it all.
Nell
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Of course there may be a page missing in the parish register etc, or one of them wed under an alias.
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My GGG-grandmother (IIRC) was called Isabella Lee, she married a Robert Bramham in Pontefract about 1870.
She was from Edinburgh around 1845, and her dad was a James Tod (who I otherwise have no record of). RC found an Isabella Tod, aged 5 in 1851, in Leith at the same household as her mother, Isabella Lees.
In view of the apparently fluid names, and there being no sign of James Tod on the census, I can only assume that Isabella born 1845 in Edinburgh was illegitimate.
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I have Isaac Bradford in my tree, born 1812 in Southchurch, Essex, he wed (perhaps) a woman from Linton in Derbyshire in about 1846 as he worked on the railways. Her maiden name was Russell, info gathered from their son William's birth cert in Moira, Leicestershire in 1848. I have tried and tried and never found the marriage of Isaac Bradford to Ann Russel, variants checked and all that jazz.
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One of my husband’s ggg grandmothers had a baby (1864) with her husband to be. Baby died as did 3 more children. Mum and 3 year old daughter appear 50 miles away, child’s death (1873) registered by an unknown at the time male. Husband still alive.
Mum and new partner have 5 children in 6 years, 3 died, then 3 months after the birth of the youngest child (1882) she married another man as a widow (husband and ‘partner’ still alive).
Husband died, and 18 months later (1895) she married, again as a widow, a man who turned out to be my husband’s ggg grandfather from a different line (his wife had died the previous year). Her first husband and her partner both still alive. Both died before her.
To confuse matters further, her death (1921) was registered by one of her 2 surviving children (my husband’s gg grandmother) but probate was granted to a still unknown man who had been lodging with them in 1911, and arranged her burial - with her 2nd husband, third being buried elsewhere with his wife.
Partner and third husband both used 2 names at various times to really cause confusion 🙄