Elusive Beckett marriage, BMD Index

[scotrootinheather]

Hello All;

I have a 'brick wall' situation in a marriage  that I cannot find, which we suspect should have happened in Co. Surrey. abt 1868-1870

My question is :  Have all the marriage parish records of London been entered into the BMD Index??  Is it complete?

I have checked both the BMD Index and the Free BMD Index and cannot find this marriage in either.

But they had their first child Rosa Georgina Beckett baptised (1870) at St. George the Martyr , Battersea,  and when the baby died 11 days later, the burial record is registered in St. George Parish, but the burial is actually in St. Mary's Battersea cemetery, in a public grave.

The parents are George and Jane Beckett , names given on baptism record.  Birth Certificate of this baby Rosa Georgina Beckett gives the same parents with mothers maiden name as 'formerly Phelps'.

I am stymied as where to go next with this marriage record hunt.   Can anyone help?? I keep thinking that there must be lost marriage records....

Thanks so much
Heather

[CaroleW]

Three possible explanations:

They never married

The GRO index for that period was indecipherable so could not be transcribed

She was previously married and Phelps was her original birth name - see below

Joe Bloggs marries Jane Phelps
Joe dies
Jane Bloggs marries George Beckett but baby Beckett's birth cert will show mums birth surname of Phelps as that was her true maiden name

[lizdb]

Is this them in 1871?

Old enough to have fitted in a previous marriage ...

RG10 733 17 29
107 Hill Street Peckham

George 26 Commercial traveller  bn Marylebone
Jane 32  bn Gloucester Upleadon

[lizdb]

But Jane was single in 1861

Rg9 587 32 1

but living in Sussex.

[scotrootinheather]

Thanks CaroleW and Lizdb, for your input here!

Yes, we believe that is them in 1871 on Hill St. in Peckham.  Jane was older than George, the family knows that, she died in Canada 1877, and he remarried.

He immigrated to Canada in 1871, she followed with their second child in spring of 1872, and had 2 more children to him in Canada.
 
It is possible she was married before, being older, but no family lore to support that, our  family says she was a chambermaid/ perhaps a seamstress as well, at the hotel the Beckett family was running in Islington in the 1860's, where she met George; Copenhagen House at the top west corner of the Metropolitan Cattle Market.  Jane does not show in the 1861 census there yet, George was only 13 then.  And their mother Mary Ann Beckett , a widow, had died before the 1871 census, so looks like the family left the Copenhagen at the time of her death... abt 1867.

I believe that is her in the 1861 Census you mentioned Lizdb, (I think you meant the 1861 census), as her birth place is the same in Gloucestershire  One link there is at this Bear Hotel where she was working in 1861  there is a lodger staying there who is a Commercial Traveller, which George Beckett also is doing in the 1871 Census record, which he continued to do once immigrated to Canada, known here as a Peddlar.     Maybe a far fetched link, but who knows now !!!

and there is the possibility they did not marry, but ALL records we have  involving her from the birth of their first child indicate she was a Beckett, and some say 'formerly Phelps'.  We cannot find a death registration for her though, but do have a church burial record...that says Mrs. George Beckett.

SO one question remains in my mind, if  GRO records were too indecipherable to transcribe,  is there any record kept of where those records came from???

Thanks so much for this!

[lizdb]

PArish records - but you would need to know the parish, and of course they may not even have married in a parish church - may be non conformist or register office, in which case of no help!

I would imagine that the most likely is that they did not marry.
She could still call herself Jane Beckitt formerly Phelps quite legally - you can call yourself what you want!
But one does wonder why not - did they just not get around to it, or was George married already?

[Valda]

Hi


It would be unlikely that both entries in the GRO would be impossible to transcribe - that entered under Beckett George as well as that, if the marriage took place, under Phelps Jane. The transcribers for FreeBMD (the transcription used by Ancestry pre 1916 for its version of the GRO index) usually have a go.


Regards

Valda

[scotrootinheather]

Lizdb,  you raised an idea we had not thought of that he may have been married already, could be although he was only 23... but who knows?!!!

Valda, thanks for the thoughts on the transcriptions, the more they are gone over the better chance of being deciphered.  I have found that in Canada here by comparing the transcriptions of our census's between Ancestry and Automated Genealogy,  definitely two versions sometimes!!!   it's been a help to me several times in locating an ancestor.

If London records were lost to fire or flood, etc, is there a site that would document that?

It seems that we may have to conclude that these two did not marry ....  I just hate giving up  and think somewhere it might still be out there...
Thanks !  Heather

[Valda]

Hi

London records haven't been lost in a fire or a flood (not since the Great Fire of London in 1666 anyway). There was very little damage to church records even during the Blitz. Any damage to individual registers is nearly always pre the second half of the C19th as are any missing sections.
 
There is potential for church marriages to be missed off the GRO index. Churches had to return their quarterly returns to the local registrar who then made a copy of the returns (GRO marriages are not the originals - all the handwriting is the same) and sent them to the GRO. Clerks toiled away indexing the marriages into large volumes. There was no checking done. When some of the old handwritten volumes began to fall apart typists were brought in to retype the handwritten volumes. Again no double checking was done and the old indexes were thrown away. So as with any index errors will creep in, but in the case of marriages it of course needs to have happened to different entries in two different volumes - Beckett under the Bs and Phelps under the Ps. There is no evidence of a missing spousal name in the FreeBMD entries for possible marriages for George Becketts, ditto Jane Phelps.

Many many, though not all London parish registers are indexed and online.


Not every one married, some because of a reason such as an impediment to the marriage, but others just did not choose to marry. One couple I researched did in the end get married after having 12 children but only because they wanted to emigrate to Australia and to get the free passage they had to produce a marriage certificate. Victorian social convention was very much a middle class imposition.

e.g. from the review of the book

Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/830

'The evidence in the book establishes beyond doubt that the 19th century was a period of energetic marital non-conformity amongst couples of all social classes. Couples and communities often resisted the legal definitions of marriage and divorce imposed upon them following the passage of Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act 1753 and the later Divorce Act 1857. In general, between 1760 and 1840 cohabitation seemed more widespread than in the mid 19th century and after 1880 attitudes towards sexual non-conformity became freer once again. Widespread practice of cohabitation has only taken place since the 1970s in Britain but many couples, albeit only a minority, chose to participate in free unions for many hundreds of years before then.'

and

http://thewitness.org/archive/april2000/marriage.html

It is possible that George without the social conventions that might have been imposed on him from parental authority chose to live with an older women who saw this arrangement as her last chance for family and home life and was willing to take the risk. If Jane's baptism was 8th January 1832 then she was already manipulating her age in the 1861 census. Was George's baptism 9th May 1847, birthdate 17th April 1847 in which case there was about 15 years between them and Jane was actually 39 in 1871. If Jane worked in the Becketts' hotel then she was an employee living in which would make establishing a relationship between them easier.


Copenhagen House in Islington was demolished in 1853 so perhaps not the same Copenhagen House but a licensed premises named after it?

http://www.runtrackdir.com/details.asp?track=london-isl
http://deadpubs.co.uk/LondonPubs/Islington/CopenhagenArms.shtml


Regards

Valda