For the longest time, very little was known about David Stratton, a great great grandfather about whom I have previously written. All I really had was his name. That name had been supplied by my paternal grandmother Beatrice (Clarke) Arntfield (1896-1987) who had emigrated from England with her parents in 1906. She told me that her mother’s maiden name had been Vickers and that her maternal grandfather, as she understood it, was David Stratton.
If my grandmother knew or was curious about the name discrepancy (one would have expected her mother’s maiden name to have been Stratton as well), she never said. Genealogy for many people is a late twentieth century interest. My impression is that my grandmother, never having known her grandfather, was simply passing on what little she had been told without any particular interest in or thought about surname differences.
My grandmother, despite her strong streak of tolerance, would have been aghast to learn that her mother was one of three illegitimate daughters born to David Stratton and her grandmother Sarah Ann Vickers. Illegitimate births until recently always carried with them a certain stigma, society generally considering any birth outside the confines of marriage as disgraceful and immoral. Some historical context, however, paints a more sympathetic picture of what occurred.
According to various archival sources now available, David Stratton had been born about 1825 in the town of Luton, Bedfordshire, England about 30 miles north of London. On September 11th, 1847 at about age 22 he married Hannah Rodwell, also 22, and already pregnant. By 1849 two children had been born who would die as infants. At the time of the 1861 census David and Hannah are shown together with now two new children. For reasons now unknown, it seems the marriage was in trouble.
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| Sarah (Vickers) Stratton |
Divorce was all but unknown in Victorian England. Until 1857 a private act of Parliament, an expensive and difficult process to which the poor had no access, was the sole route available to legally dissolve a marriage. Even after rudimentary divorce legislation was enacted, it remained a costly procedure beyond the means of a common labourer such as David Stratton. The 1861 census taken on April 7th of that year listed David still together with his first family. Within a year, however, when about 37 years of age, he was with much younger 23-year- old Sarah Ann Vickers (1838 – 1919) with whom he fathered his first child, my great grandmother Sarah Ann Vickers (1862 – 1931), born on March 15th 1862. Was David a womanizer smitten by the considerably younger Sarah Ann? Was Sarah Ann some sort of femme fatale who lured David from a perfectly sound marriage? Or, had the marriage, for reasons now unknown, simply irretrievably broken down without today’s panacea of divorce being an available economic option?
For whatever the reason, and no doubt carrying considerable social stigma with them, David and Sarah Ann began functioning as a couple "living in sin" as it was then called. Sarah was euphemistically listed on subsequent census records as a boarder. Two more daughters were born to the couple in following years while first wife Hannah carried on alone in Luton with her two children.
Hannah eventually died and was buried in Luton on October 1st, 1890 at the age of 65. Finally David could make an “honest woman” out of Sarah Ann with whom he had now lived for almost 30 years. On October 27th, 1890, 26 days after Hannah’s burial, David Stratton and Sarah Ann Vickers married, he being properly described as a widower and she as a spinster, albeit the mother of three now grown daughters.
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| Sarah Ann (Vickers) Clarke |
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