An Inconvenient Truth

 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 11^th, 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.

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 7^th 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 15^th 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.     

Sarah Ann (Vickers) Clarke

David Stratton would die in 1900 and Sarah Ann Vickers in 1919.  Their three illegitimate daughters, Sarah Ann, Minnie, and Lizzie, were never known to have spoken of the illegitimacy later made right by the eventual marriage of their parents.  Twenty-first century thinking would suggest that any stigma surrounding their births now more properly rests with a society in which people were expected to remain in broken marriages on account of divorce being an option only available to the wealthy.  

     

 

 

Great Grandma Was A Fibber

 “One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”

― Oscar Wilde

By that measure of character, it appears that Oscar Wilde would have implicitly trusted my great grandmother Sarah Ann (Vickers) Clarke (1862-1931).  A lifelong fibber about her age, her penchant for doing so may also have had something to do with perhaps trying to appear younger in successive marriages to progressively younger men.

Born in Luton, England, my father’s maternal grandmother’s officially registered date of birth was March 15, 1862.  Her nascent fibbing skills are seen at the time of her first marriage to 27 year old John Gutteridge on March 3, 1883.  Listing her age as 21 when she was in fact 20, a small quibble perhaps since she was only twelve days shy of her 21^st birthday, Sarah would never again be so close to being truthful when marrying.    

Pregnant at the time of this marriage, Sarah Ann would first lose her new husband, six years her senior, after only two months of marriage.  Later in August of that same year, she would also lose the child of that marriage two days after his birth.  Widowed while still 21, Sarah Ann, from that point on apparently decided to set her sights on younger men.

Her next choice two years later was eighteen year old Albert Clarke born February 25, 1867 and a full five years her junior.  When the two were married on August 31, 1885, Sarah claimed to be a 22 year old spinster when she was in fact a 23-year-old widow.  Albert was not above joining in the charade himself.  He claimed to be 21 years of age when actually 18.  Unfortunately, marrying a man younger by five years proved to be no antidote to widowhood.  After five children and the family’s immigration to Canada, in 1907 Albert would suddenly die from a heart condition at the young age of 43. 

After a second widowhood of two years, Sarah was again ready to give marriage a try.  Having been predeceased now by both an older and younger husband, this time she dug deep for her new “boy toy”.  William Williams was only 32 years of age in 1909 when he married a now 47 year old Sarah.  Rather outrageously, Williams would only have been but five years of age at the time of Sarah’s first marriage.  He was but nine years older than Sarah’s eldest child. 

Given her five adult children and a physically obvious age disparity, on this occasion Sarah’s fibbing options were limited.  She did manage, however, this time round to shave four years off her age, claiming now to be 43, eleven years her husband’s senior rather than the fifteen years she in fact was.  Sarah for some reason had been promoting the 1866 year of birth myth as early as 1906, the year the family sailed to Canada, when she claimed to be age forty according to the ship’s manifest. 

After over twenty years of a less than happy marriage to her unfaithful third husband, Sarah died January 14, 1931, at last having a husband who outlived her.  At the time of Sarah’s death, her youngest child, Beatrice (Clarke) Arntfield, believing the fib and clearly unaware of her mother’s true birth date, gave her mother’s death in her obituary as 64 rather than the 68 it was.  Apart from a lifetime of misstating her age, Sarah had also never revealed to any family members the details of her first ill-fated marriage and child.  There are just some things that remain a woman’s prerogative to conceal.

                                                                                                                                 David Arntfield