Genealogy Chat

Shall i give up and just accept the fact that my great aunt lived in sin? I have been searching for soooooo long now for the marriage maybe i should give up and accept the fact.? Lillie mary( powell) born 1872 in madeley shropshire appears with husband Charles Henry Curzon (1872) in 1901 . They have 2 daughters linda curzon 1894 and annie 1898.I have linda's birth cert which states mother as lillie mary curzon formerly powell. Was it common to lie on birth certs? chris

Yes, not unknown to lie, you didnt have to prove you were married. Have you searched later years for a marriage? People often didnt marry for twenty years or more, if there was a previous spouse. OC

Thankyou OC, Yes i will check another 10 years more! i don't like to be beaten !chris

I had a couple called thistlewood / stead who didnt marry until after the birth of their 10th child ...18 years after the birth of their first, so its worth checking much further forward than you think.

Thankyou Shazzy, Was this all very common behaviour or would it have been frowned on at the time. Its just i,ve always thought there was a family feud on my Powell branch and i wonder if this living in sin might have been a factor? chris

I have a couple who were living together as man and wife in the 1891 census, had their first child in 1895, and finally married in 1931 when the bride was correctly styled a spinster. So it is worth trawling a long way forwards. Peter

It was far more common than you think - divorce was rare and very expensive, so people just lived in sin. BUT - they didnt tell anyone they were, and would have pretended to be respectably married - respectability was everything in Victorian times, or at least the appearance of respectability! OC

Frowned on...yes, common....absolutely !!! I have more illegitimate children than you can shake a stick at in my tree, a good sprinkling of marriages between 1st cousins, which although was'nt illegal the victorians tried to put a stop to it with stories of horrid consequences if you did it, i have one GGG grandparent who had 4 children after her husband died, all to different men and who was listed as a charwoman...a woman who does and she certainly did lol...and thats all just for starters...since begining the family tree adventure i have lost any sense of superiority i might have had (which wasnt much anyway) because the fact is every family has plenty of skeletons in its closet and they're not usually too hard to find !!!

Thankyou all for your help .I am trying to get on ancestry to start searching further. Doesn't seem to be working at moment. I will let you know if i find a marriage.best wishes Chris

Shazzy When I first started my research many years ago, an old researcher told me that if I didnt find any illegitimacy in my family then I hadn't looked properly, lol. He was right - illegitimacy, bigamy, marrying the dead wife's sister and so on. It was all kept very quiet within the family of course. OC

My husbands Grandparents had 14 children and never bothered to get married, no one knew about it until we started the family tree. his ''wife'' had been married before and they would not have been able to aford a divorce.

Thankyou Moira, yes, i think it would be worth my while to consider whether Lillie or charles had been married before.I'll let you know how i get on .thanks again. chris

ex Shazzy (i didnt like the name ) Oc I think we could start a league table Three point s for Bigamy two for 'dubious occupations' and just the one for having illegitimate children.....cos everyone did that lolol, winner gets the GR debauchery cup lol

Look carefully at alternative spellings. I searched for months for my g-grandparents without sucess. I knew that they were certainly married, even if I wasn't sure about anyone else. Eventually I found it using soundex on Ancestry. His surname was shown as 'Wright' instead of 'Wight', and her first name was spelt incorrectly. I now have their marriage cert. Happy hunting Anne

Chris - they were not necessarily lying. If they were living together the woman usually took the man's surname, and the children's birth certificates could quite correctly record the mother's name as 'formerly x', certainly for registration purposes. You could doublecheck, if you possibly can, for christenings in the parish records, because there, the rector would usually say 'base born' -( if he was a nice man!), if the couple were not married. I don't think I would have taken to the rector who recorded 'Bastard son of that whore XX'. Wendy PS Don't go, OC!!!!