Well, I'm sometimes a little cagey about actual names, just for privacy reasons. My gr-grfather is one of the children, and that's the point where I kind of draw the line sometimes on giving names.
I know where everybody in the family was:
- (well, in 1841, I don't know where either of the parents was, although I have theories about them - common names, lack of detail on census, crossing between Cornwall and Devon ... the second and third kids of the couple were registered in Devon in 1845-6, then the next ones in Cornwall)
- in 1851 in Cornwall (the family all together, as they're all listed in the household ... but there are questions about the paternity of the child born later that year and the next child, despite the certificates; DNA kit is waiting to get done later this month!)
- 1854 a batch of younger children baptised in Cornwall, 1859 the father is identified in the mining licence as resident in Middlesex, 1860 the stray eldest son is baptised in Torpoint
- in 1861 in Plymouth (mother and all kids, father not found yet but as of the 1859 mining licence thing he was identified as being in the place in London where he met his next wife around 1867)
- in 1871, all of them accounted for in different places (the father in London with his new "wife" - and their child - whom he married a few weeks later, while the first wife was still living - she was also in London with some of the kids - but then I've never found a marriage for them)
It's the father in 1861 I can't find, and if I can't find him, he isn't there.
He could well have been in Australia where the magnate from Wales (his daughter's father-in-law) was in the 1850s and 1860s.
It seems the parents were separate/estranged sometime in the mid-late 1850s, if not before (there being, of course, a tale about who the "real" father of the kids born 1851 onward were). But the baptisms still took place in the 1850s as if the family was intact, and it could have been, with him just living away for business. They may have cohabited in London in the late 1860s, as his former address in his bankruptcy proceedings was the wife's address in 1871. Broad Street! - the daughter was an actress.
In case you're wondering ... amid all this wheeling and dealing and on-stage performing in 1871, my gr-grfather was hauling crates of biscuits in a factory in Berkshire, and ended up a gasworks lunchroom attendant in London, married to a police sgt's daughter, many years later before emigrating to Canada. If there were money and connections to be had in that family, we didn't get 'em. When his son married my grandmother in Canada, her father, a railway fireman, considered the marriage to be well beneath her.
Let me poke around at it over the next little while and see whether I can get any idea of what they would have been doing at Thanckes. Hell, maybe it was just the mother who was there, and I might find a clue about how she crossed paths with her alleged paramour ...
