The Truth (as I See it Now!) About Maria

A few weeks ago I watched a performance of The Importance of Being Ernest.  It was the first time I'd seen the play since sitting mesmerised at the age of eleven watching the school performance at the end of my first term at high school.  On the safety curtain at this performance, which was screened to our local cinema directly from the Vaudeville Theatre in London's West End, was projected a quote from the author, Oscar Wilde: "If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out."

I think I can see why it is that these words have stuck in my mind ever since!  It was very soon afterwards that I mentioned in this blog the death of my great aunt Maria just before the end of the nineteenth century; as I did so, I wondered how it was that I knew that she had died in Accrington.  I have recorded most deaths by the registration district, but usually the only reference to a specific location is from the burial register and, mostly this would be the case when death pre-dated the start of national registration in 1837.  On searching my database I found that I had noted this from the edition of the Accrington Observer and Times of 30th May, 1896.  Intrigued, I looked in my files for a copy of the obituary ... no sign of it!

I decided that I had probably looked it up in the on line newspaper collection on Find my Past ... that title isn't digitised yet.  Could it have been via Lancashire library service ... one of the few for which you don't have to be resident to subscribe?  As I tried - without success - to retrace my research of some years ago, I discovered a post on Genes Reunited from someone called Valerie, whose great-grandfather was one Fred Cubitt ... my great aunt's youngest son.  My enthusiasm was stoked and I hastily took out a month's subscription to enable me to post a message to Valerie ... before realising that this message was posted over eight years ago!  Unsurprisingly, I have had no reply.  I did note, however, that one respondent in 2010 had kindly provided the local birth references from Preston record office for five of the children and I thought it a good idea to make a note of these.

This is where the Oscar Wilde quotation becomes relevant for, having stated that great aunt Maria had 'married and raised a family of six children', I then discovered that - depending on definitions and parameters - she could be truthfully said to have raised a family of five, seven or eight children ... but not six, as I firmly believed to be true when I wrote it.  I knew that Maria's eldest daughter was born in 1871, before she had left Suffolk, and I assumed that the birth references that I was now about to collect related to the other five children, born between 1877 and 1889.  As I noted them, however, I realised that the two eldest, born 1877 and 1880, were missing from the list and two new names had appeared in the midst of the other three I knew about, giving a total of seven Lancashire births, plus the eldest daughter, making a family of eight.

This discovery has prompted many evenings of further research into the family ... and I expect there will be more to come!  I suspect the eldest daughter, Suffolk-born Annie, never really felt part of the family. She was so much older than the other children, and was almost five when her mother married Stephen Cubitt.  In the 1881 census she was named as Cubitt and correctly described as 'step-daughter' to Stephen, but ten years later, by which time she was nineteen, she was called Evans and listed, bizarrely, as his 'sister-in-law'.  She retained her mother's maiden name up to her marriage in 1894.

The two hitherto 'unknown' sons were Arthur and Willie. Arthur died in the summer of 1884 at a maximum age of five months; Willie was born a year later and died in 1889 without either of them having appeared on a census, which explains why I had no record of their existence.

I have now traced most of the other children's families down several generations and have linked in the mysterious Valerie who started the whole stampede for truth ... although I'll probably never have any contact with her.  The eldest Cubitt daughter, Mary Ellen, appears to have led a single life, since I've found a possible death of Mary E Cubitt at about the right age in 1958, but more verification will be required before I can accept this, since she died in Paddington!

Annoyingly, though, I still haven't found that news cutting about Maria's death!