William Francis OLIVER, born October 1850 (General)

by unknown, Monday, May 05, 2008, 12:57 (6053 days ago) @ slowhands

Goodness me you've been busy!!

Some of this I have as Susannah's ggranddaughter is a cousin of my mother's. We know that the children were brought up by my ggrandfather, Frederick James Hayes,who was 15 when he and his mother took them on. This meant that their mother Catherine Elizabeth could go into service. She died while William Francis was on the Inconstant. Whether or not he knew we don't know. It is conceivable that he returned to the Forest in 1882 having been paid off to find them all gone. At some point between 1881 and 1891 Frederick James took them all to Claurplwyf, Mynnyddyslwyn. The death you found for Catherine is indeed his mother. She's buried in Cwmnantyrodin which is just up the hill from Claurplwyf, although the family had already moved on to Llanhilleth by then.

The Bethnal Green marriage had me going for a while too. I spent months going through every Hayes family in Bethnal Green which had family names and tracing them back to find some reason for Catherine to have been there. Her father, the ever mysterious Arthur James Hayes, ought to have had siblings having been born in 1822 to a couple who married in 1803... but I have no idea where they were. However, to return to Catherine Elizabeth and William Francis. Their marriage certificate gives their addresses just as Bethnal Green and EVENTUALLY I realised that this was a little odd and started to wonder about this marriage. After much digging, I discovered that Bethnal Green had a renegade vicar at this time who was doing marriages for free to reduce the numbers of hias poverty-stricken parishioners who could not afford to marry and therefore lived in sin. It seems that people were going up to London by train to be married in batches by him and then returning home. He asked no questions and they just put Bethnal Green as their address. More digging through the library at Lambeth Palace unearthed the fact that there was no legal maximum for marriage fees at this time and that many clerics charged their own fees on top of the church fees. Presumably Cinderford came into this category and it was cheaper for the two of them plus Catherine's sister Fanny to go to London and back by train than to be married in Cinderford. Amazing!

However, none of this alters the fact that William must have been somewhere before he married, but where? I must offer apologies for not giving you everything I knew first time round, but I did not dream that you would attack the issue with such enthusiasm!! Thank you! And I didn't want to "go on for ever" with an enquiry notice. Sorry!

I haven't had a chance to go through all your suggestions for William yet ...and it's far too late now. But I shall have a proper look tomorrow I hope.

Regards,
Sian.