Wow, thank you all for this wonderful information. It will take a little time for me to go through it all. I do have a lot of information found at my family tree on ancestry. Based on that, here is what I know:
Edward Midworth Hughes married Elsie Lydia Cook around 1911 in England. They had 1 stillborn child in England, their first. They had a second child in England in 1913, my grandfather Henry Edward Hughes. After his birth, and while pregnant with their 3rd child, they immigrated to the US, arriving on the west coast (Gilroy, California) in 1914.They had their 3rd child Alfred John Hughes in 1914. Edward Midworth Hughes disappeared, abandoning his wife and 2 children in 1917. The family rumors are that he went to stay with his brother Alfred Ernest Hughes in Johannesburg, where Alfred was working as a surveyor at the East Rand Mines. We found that while in Johannesburg, Edward then married Margaretha Fredericka Petronella Hirsch De Klerck in 1926. She divorced him on the basis of abandonment in 1941 or 1942. They adopted a son while together, and named him Henry Edward Hughes, the same name as his 2nd son, my grandfather. He disappeared from their lives as well, and I have nothing else on him until his death record at a British retirement home in Kenya in 1960, age 73. I do have some photos of him, nothing else. I am looking for anything I can find on him, and his brother Alfred Ernest Hughes. Alfred's life is a total mystery to us, all that we know is he was a surveyor at the mine mentioned above. That information came from his father John Hughes' obituary in 1908. This entire leg of our Hughes family is a big Mystery. I do Have relatives for John Hughes, his parents George Hughes and Charlotte Sentence. He did have his youngest sister Lucy Hughes, it is questionable to us if she was from George Hughes or Charlottes second Husband John Shelton. The search continues....Thank you again for your information.
Eric
