52 Ancestors challenge Week Three : Tough Women

[blueswan]

Week two didn't happen. I have zero ancestors with any connections named King and none at all connected to royalty.So no week two.

:

My great grandmother Mary Ann Morley has me stumped. Initially, I started with only a story from my father and a name. I got a date and place of birth (1853, Ontario) from the 1881 Canadian census. That was the only census on which I could find her. While looking for spelling variations of Morley, I came across the family of William and Ann Morly on the 1871 Census. They had a daughter Mary A. born in 1858 in England. I put it aside as a possibility to look into later. In the meantime, there is no record of her marriage or the births of her children nor her death. With the exception of that single census record she seemed to be a ghost.

Then one day on an unrelated search through a cemetery's listing I spotted a William Morley born 1830 in England.. This was and is still a very small community, so I hoped they were related to Mary Ann. I was very excited when I saw that William's wife was Ann Rivers, also born 1830 in England. Why the excitement? Well, coincidentally, one of my great grandmothers was Alice Rivers. Her daughter Lydia married Mary Ann's son Fred. (I don't believe in coincidences.)

By the 1891 census all record of both great grandparents disappears. There are no death records, nor have I had any luck with searching cemeteries. Two of their three children show up on the 1891 census with other families, the oldest boy with William and Ann, the baby girl with a neighbour. The middle child, my grandfather, may be the ten year old Fred who shows up in a workhouse - there are a lot of adults there as well as children - in Toronto.

This is where the story I mentioned earlier comes in. According to my dad, his grandfather was a nasty man who beat his wife. Finally she had enough, packed up her young son Fred and fled to family in the states. (I have tried looking up divorce records as well. Nothing.No border crossing information. Nothing in the US Censuses either.) I suspect this was what a little boy wished had happened. It sounds so much nicer than growing up in a workhouse. It also explains why my dad's youngest sister was adopted. (Family gossip says she was family.)

So every few years, I try to forget my old thoughts and try looking in a different place or way or for another variation on her name. Twice now I've thought I'd found Mary Ann, but it turns out she had a sister Margaret Ann who married into the same family that took in Mary Ann's little girl.

It's always been a small world.

Comments

[dragonfly]

You know, I read your post not long after my own where I speculated that the spate of deaths of young people might have been because of the 1918 pandemic. I can't help while reading your post to twig to the missing great-grandparents in the 1891 census. Did you know there was a 1889-1891 flu pandemic also? It wasn't as horrible as the one 28 years later but epidemiologists think it was an early form of H1N1 that came roaring back in 1918. One reason they think that is that after the smoke cleared, it turned out that older people who earlier had sickened in 1891 but lived, survived the 1918 flu just fine. Anyway, George Hazlett, the ancestor I wrote about in my "Fresh Start" post, died of the flu in 1891. I wonder if your great-grandparents did too. If the flu came through town in a serious enough way, burials and death announcements could have been disrupted from their normal process.

[blueswan]

I wasn't aware of the earlier pandemics in the nineteenth century, but I am now. This is a definite possibility I will explore and see where it leads. Thanks for the tip.