William "Billy or Kingfisher O' the North" Melton

[Doc M]

I'm interested in Billy's brother Thornton. He married my great-grandmother Sarah Jane Nichols in 1881, but they split up before 1891, and she went to Hull as a fish-gutter. There, she moved in with John Thomas Todd. They had several children (including my grandfather), some of whom, cheekily, had Melton as a middle name, then she married him (bigamously – she claimed to be a widow) in Scarborough in October 1905. Thornton died either in 1906 in Scarborough or 1930 in Sheffield. The problem is, there are 2 Thornton Meltons of about the same age – my Thornton is Billy's brother, the son of Thomas and Eliza, but there's another one, the son of David and another Elizabeth. (Sarah's illegal second 'husband' died in 1924, and she died in 1933.) I can't sort out which died when.

[Pels.]

Hi Doc M,

Bullamore hasn't been online since June.

It might be worth your while to send him a Private Message (PM) if he doesn't get back to you. We can't always rely on the email notification's getting through for threads such as this.

You can send him a message by clicking on the small green scroll under his username, on the initial post.

Good luck,

Pels.

[Doc M]

Thanks! I've only just discovered this connection, and am intrigued. My grandfather had Melton as his middle name, and we'd been trying to find out where it came from. It was a bit of an eye-opener that it was his mother's legal husband's name, and that he and all his siblings were illegitimate! She had always projected an image of stiff respectability and as far as we had always understood, was married to my great-grandfather. We had known nothing of a previous marriage, let alone that she had got away with bigamy!

[Pels.]

I've sent Bullamore a message enclosing the links from this thread and the previous one of his you replied to. In an ideal world, this should work !!

Fingers crossed,

Pels.