Lightwoods Park, Birmingham, Warwickshire
It took me years to find the marriage record of my grandfather's parents. By 1881 William Strange Chambers and Sarah Ann Conway Chambers were living in Nuneaton which is close to Birmingham in England. But when did they get together? I couldn't find a marriage for Chambers/Chubb (her maiden name) in Nuneaton or Birmingham. Maybe they got married where they lived before coming to the Birmingham area. The 1871 censuses showed him living in Kettering, Northamptonshire and her in Yeovil, Somerset. There were no likely marriage entries for those places either.
Kettering and Yeovil aren't exactly next door to each other, kind of makes you wonder how the couple ever met, doesn't it? The clue was in the occupations. The 1881 census gave William's occupation as a commercial traveler in the drapery trade. The 1871 census showed Sarah Ann as a draper's assistant. I can picture him entering her place of work in his travels. She must have caught his eye or maybe he caught her's. Whoever initiated things, that would have been an interesting courtship. William was twelve years younger than Sarah Ann and only 24 in their first census listing as a married couple. Because of the difference in their ages, for a while I toyed with the idea that she had been married previously so was listed under a different last name in the marriage indexes. That didn't result in a marriage entry either.
Sometime later, I had given up searching and was idly looking up items for William Chambers on FindMyPast's newspaper database when an entry came up for William Strange Chambers. I couldn't believe it when I saw it was a marriage announcement in the November 13, 1880 Northampton Mercury about my great grandparents' marriage in St Helier, Jersey.
Maybe an early destination wedding? Not really. Women often went back home to get married but Sarah Ann had been born in Evershot, Dorset. Later her parents moved to Weymouth and then Jersey but Sarah Ann hadn't moved with them. It hadn't crossed my mind that she would go to her parents' home, a place she had never lived, to tie the knot especially as it would have been a fair distance from wherever she was living at the time. But the announcement proved that it was the people, not the place that were the important part of the wedding.
Image:
By
Young, Richard L., born 1921 (artist) -
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1104928/lightwoods-park-birmingham-warwickshire-watercolour-young-richard-l/,
Public Domain,
Hah! They rewarded you eventually!! And gave you more information on her parents too. Congratulations!!
ReplyDeleteMy great-grandmother went back to her family home to have her first baby, my grandfather. An entirely new to me place for this family.
Somehow going back to the comforts of home doesn't seem right when the parents have moved to a strange place, does it? I know it didn't cross my mind when I had my child, but then our mindset is different these days.
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