Hi Daisy,
Thanks for all the info. You are not the bearer of bad news at all - quite the reverse, as you have saved me from heading off down the wrong track with the info about Arthur Coventry Harding and wasting hours of effort. Thank you!
The RC priest in Ballincollig would not let us look at the original records for ourselves
, but he searched through them himself while we were there and said he could not locate a marriage entry for Arthur Harding and Margaret Long for the period during which we thought they would have been married.
The puzzling part is that the Arthur Harding in Lancashire fits most of the criteria for my great-grandfather (i.e., born in Croydon, service with the Army, service in the East Indies, occupation in 1901 grocer/shopkeeper, etc) and if his wife's name was Margaret it would in my mind have been pretty conclusive.
However, the IGI entry for his son John that you found earlier -
HARDING John
Birth; 24 Jul 1873 India Office Ecclesiastical Returns-Bengal Presidency...Misc...India
Father; Arthur HARDING
Mother; Ellen
clearly shows his mother's name to be "Ellen". From the census returns we also know that she was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, not Ireland, so this can't be an alternative name for "Margaret" Long. Since it is clearly a different person, the key question if this is the same Arthur Harding seems to be "what happened to Margaret?"
I have asked my Ballincollig contact, Mrs Jordan, if she can follow up to see if there is any record of Margaret Long's death there, but I will certainly follow up your suggestion to see if Margaret in fact died in the East Indies and Arthur remarried while over there.
There is no record of that event on his service record, however, and I did not have time while in London to check the Pay and Muster books for the late 1860's/early1870's to see if there was a marriage allowance entry paid to him.
I may also follow up your suggestion and get one of the children's birth certificates to determine Ellen's maiden name, but I'll do a bit more digging first.
It is entirely possible that there were two Arthur Hardings both born in Croydon and who both served in the Army in the East Indies, but I would not have thought the coincidence to be very likely. However, the single factor that now makes me think this a possibility is that whereas my great-grandfather was born in Croydon in April or May 1835 (from his Army discharge papers), the Arthur Harding in Lancashire was born about 2 years later (if the census records for 1891 and 1901 give his age accurately).
It's certainly a puzzle, but each little piece of information that comes to light is helping to unravel it.
Regards
Mike