Mary Ann CLARKE- LEWIS- JAMES Blakeney and Cardiff (General)

by mrsbruso , Friday, December 31, 2010, 16:05 (5083 days ago) @ slowhands

Once again, I owe you a debt of thanks . . .

I was focussing on the 1911 John James death because in the 1911 census, they are only listing one John James, born in Aberthaw in 1837, and he is listed as a lodger and old age pensioner, which didn't make a great deal of sense to me (on Union Street, as I remember).

Mary Ann was at Box Tree Cottage at the time as a "visitor" (but is listed as married not as a widow), so I suppose he could have been elsewhere as well. Only five years later, she also left a much more substantial estate (approximately four or five times larger) . . . If one spouse is remaining, does that mean that they only include personal property, rather than real property in the estate? (Might account for the difference.) By all accounts she was a fairly successful businesswoman . . . but I can't see her accumulating so much so quickly (toward the end of her life), and I am making the unwarranted assumption that a woman's assets were joint with her husband's even if she were the one who acquired them . . .

Of course, her mother died in the interim, so there might have been an inheritance during that time as well, but with several siblings I wouldn't have expected that to be susbtantial.

The 1913 death makes sense, though, as the chances of two seventy-six year old men sharing the same name, born in the same small town, both living in Cardiff and leaving a widow named Mary Ann seem a bit improbable. (I think the 1911 census was where I went astray . . .)