Well Certified!

It was over two years ago that I realised what a good idea it would be to copy my collection of birth, marriage and death certificates 'to the cloud'.  After all, to replace them at the present price of £11 each (or even taking the newly-introduced option of a pdf copy for only £7), would cost several hundred pounds.  Now, I realise that many of these were only obtained to provide a step in the research chain, so I probably wouldn't bother to replace them if they were lost, but I would still miss them.

The present lock-down situation has provided me with the ideal opportunity finally to execute this long-delayed project and, in doing so, I've realised just how precious some of these original pieces of history are.  Some are dear to me as family mementos ... I almost shed a tear when I turned over my mother's birth certificate: the short-form, with just the barest of details, and written on the flimsiest paper owing to wartime constraints.  Others have their own particular stories to tell, some of which I narrate below.

Unique among my collection, and almost certainly the most beautiful, is the certificate of my great-uncle George Evans's second marriage. Although the ceremony took place in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, which later would become part of Northern Ireland, the fact that it occurred before partition meant that I had to obtain a copy from Dublin.  I think you would agree that, on purely aesthetic grounds, it was worth every cent of the €20 price tag.

I've written here before about George, who was posted in Ireland during army service, was discharged as a result of an accident, married in Enniskillen and raised a family there, through long service on the railway.  His wife, Mary Jane, the mother of their nine children, died of what we would probably call bowel cancer in 1906 and, just over four years later, at the age of 57, he embarked on a second marriage to Margaret McMahon.  In 1901, she was already widowed and kept a boarding house in Dublin, said she could read/write and was 42 years old.  When she married George in October 1910 she was 55, and didn't sign her name.  In the census the following year, it was said that neither of them could read/write.  Make of that what you will.

I spoke of pdf versions of English certificates being available at a cost; the authorities in Ireland are much more obliging and will provide free of charge, a copy of the whole page that includes the register entry you seek.  I have over 40 of these (which I treat as certificates nonetheless) in respect of George and Mary Jane's descendants, many of whom have army connections.  Two of these tell the sad tale of their fourth daughter, Rose Anne, who was born in 1886.  In Limerick in 1904, like some of her sisters, Rose married a soldier.  Leigh Rowlands had been born in Chester in 1879 and, at the baptism of their first child at Dartford in 1908, he was described as a Sergeant in the Liverpool Regiment.

My Irish register copies reveal that Leigh died of heart disease on 29th Sept. 1909 in the military hospital at Kinsale, Co. Cork.  Little over three months later, at the home of her parents in Abbey St, Enniskillen, Rose gave birth to their second son, who was given his father's names, Leigh Wyatt.  The baby lived only fifty days and died of bronchitis on 22nd of February.  Four days later, Rose registered the death with those poignant words, 'widow of a soldier', and 'present at the death'.  Having spent many months researching the family a few years ago, I've never gone back to find out what happened to her later.  This reminder tells me that perhaps it's time I did.

My great-great-aunt Alice Thirza Sturgeon was born in Stanton, Suffolk and her husband, William Steggles, in nearby Hepworth a few years earlier.  However, they married in Chesterfield in 1890.  Thereafter, they moved about quite a bit.  By 1901 they were in Great Yarmouth and in 1911 back in Derbyshire again.  She died in 1933 at home in Suffolk, and her husband was living in 1939 with his youngest daughter, Pattie, just down the road from my grandparents in Diss, where she had a hairdressing business.

I have the marriage certificate for Pattie's next sister, Gladys (there were nine children altogether, but only five survived beyond nine years) to Archie Francis in 1931.  As I scanned it the other day, I noticed that the ceremony took place at St Augustine's, Chesterfield.  (That's not the church with the famous crooked spire, but a modern brick edifice on the road to Sheffield.)  I was curious about why they should have married there.  Turning up the research of many years ago, I found the past links to the area noted above.  They were back in Suffolk by 1939, where Archie was carrying on the family business of a threshing machine proprietor.

I remember that hairdressing business, and once, at the age of six or less, being sent on an errand to get some hair pins there.  Pattie, Gladys and Archie were often mentioned in conversation; after all, all of them were cousins to my grandfather.  Gladys and Archie were first cousins, and I wonder if that might have been the reason for marrying away from home.  In Archie's case, there was already some sniff of what might have been thought of as family scandal.  His father had been married for forty-six years and sired no children.  Just over two years after his wife's death, he married his niece, who was Alice Thirza's sister; He was 70, she only 30.  Archie was the result.  My grandfather was the eldest of his family; he would have been in his late teens when all this was taking place and no doubt the amusement it caused lingered in his memory for many a year!