A Somerset Lad

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective once suggested that once one had eliminated all other possibilities, what remained must be the truth.

Undoubtedly, there is a philosophical term for such a process of logic, something in Latin that is a pithy statement of a complex thought process. It is a process that seems to have brought an unexpected outcome in my genealogical searches.

Since my father’s death last year there seems to have been a greater sense of urgency in assembling the family tree, a greater feeling of need to find the names of forebears who had either long been forgotten or had never been known to exist.

Ellen Miriam Poolton, my great grandmother, had a long relationship with Frederick Robert Stratton. Ellen had three children of whom we knew, Sidney Herbert, whose father is unnamed, and George Stanley and Ida Frederica, for whom Fred Stratton seems to be the father (to the extent that he is named on Stanley’s birth certificate).

However, there remained questions arising from Ellen’s death as a twenty-three year old in March 1912. Under “Cause of Death,” her death certificate states, “Pelvic cellulitis (originally puerperal June 1910) Septic peritonitis.”

A puerperal infection occurs after childbirth, Ellen had concluded a pregnancy in June 1910, but it could not have been any of her other three children who were born in 1906, 1908 and 1909.

A search for Poolton connections in the south London area that was home to Ellen’s family produced the name of Frederick S. Poolton. At the time of the 1911 Census on 2nd April that year, Frederick Poolton was a nine month old baby in the Western Fever Hospital on the Seagrave Road in Fulham. The hospital was under the management of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, it was an institution for poorer Londoners.

Assuming Frederick S. Poolton had become nine months old in the days prior to the census, he would have been born in June 1910. Information about his life is scarce. There are entries regarding the registration of his birth, marriage and death and electoral registers showing his full name, Frederick Stanley Poolton, and his various addresses up to the time of his death at the age of forty-five in 1955. His wife was Ellen Lucy Wall. They do not seem to have had children.

Pooltons are not common, and the only candidate to be his mother in Wandsworth seems to be Ellen Miriam, who had a baby in June 1910, whose partner was called Frederick, and who had already shown a fondness for Stanley as a middle name.

By a process of elimination, Frederick S. Poolton would seem to be a grand uncle. Unless it is a possibility that itself can be eliminated.

It is clear that by the time of the 1911 Census, Ada, my great great grandmother, was struggling. Ada is the only adult in the small house in which she lives. Ida, Ada’s two year old granddaughter, and my grand aunt is living with her. Ellen, Ida’s mother, my great grandmother, is in the workhouse infirmary. There is no record of Charles, Ada’s son who was ten years younger than Ellen. Neither of Ellen’s sons, Stanley who would have been aged three, my grand uncle, nor Sidney, my grandfather who would have been five, seem to appear anywhere in the 1911 Census returns.

Ada, who would have been forty-two years of age, has earned money in whatever way has been possible. In one place, she is recorded as a charwoman, in the 1911 Census she is recorded as a “massager.” A code number against the occupation suggests that this was some early form of physiotherapist.

Ada is struggling not because she is a widow, but because Hugh, her forty-four year old husband, who had his hearing damaged during military service, is living at 31 Edward Street, Aldershot and is working as a general labourer for the War Department. There is no acknowledgement of having a family on his census return. Twelve year old Charles is not living with him.

Ada’s life did not become easier. Ellen died the following year and Ada seems to have become responsible for two of her three grandchildren.

Ada died in 1932, and Hugh married Rose, who seemed to be his second wife later that year.

Except Rose was not his second wife. The hints on the Ancestry website had kept on suggesting Hugh had been married to a woman called Sarah Jane, and I had kept ignoring them, until, checking the electoral registers for the 1920s, I discovered that he shared a house with a Sarah Jane.

Further investigation showed that he had indeed married Sarah Jane in 1923. Had he been away from Ada for so long that he felt free to remarry, for there is no record of any divorce. Even if it had been contemplated, it would have been beyond the pocket of a working man.

When Hugh married in 1932, it was not for the second time, it was for the third time, and he gets married late in that year not because Ada has died but because Sarah Jane has died.

Having left my great great grandmother to a life of hardship, it seems that my great great grandfather became a bigamist, the second one I have discovered in the family tree.