Margaret Ann Stephens
My great-grandmother, Margaret Ann Stephens, was born in 1890. She was born in an age where, we are told, that marriages lasted until death and illegitimacy was frowned upon. She was the 3rd of 6 children and seems to have been a one-off. From this distance I’m not sure if I’m impressed by the way she did what she wanted or disapproving of how she lived her life and the pain that must have caused to the people around her.
When I first started researching my family tree I knew that my grandmother, her first child, was illegitimate; I knew that she had married Grandpa Osborne and had my auntie Nancy, divorced Grandpa Osborne and married Grandpa Evans and had my uncles David and Sam; then when Grandpa Evans died she remarried Grandpa Osborne and had my uncles Jimmy and Malcolm. The “divorce” sounded a bit dodgy given it was the 1920s and they weren’t easy to come by and it was an old joke that all the Osbornes looked like Evanses and vice versa. I also remember an old story being told that when she died, 3 people turned up at (or just after) her funeral claiming to be her only legitimate children and wanting to know if she had “left” anything; apparently my Uncle Jimmy told them that if that was the case he’d be happy to let them pay for her funeral and no more was heard from them.
My mother happened to have a copy of Nancy’s birth certificate (long story!) and sure enough it looks as if Margaret Stephens and James Osborne were married. Except they weren’t. When I started digging I found that Margaret has married within months of my grandmother’s birth. My grandmother was born on 22 August 1907 and Margaret married a man called David Gear on 4 January 1908. I had scoured the Birth Indexes for children and there were several possibilities but nothing I could be sure of as the mother’s maiden name wasn’t recorded in the index until 1912. It has always seemed unlikely that my grandmother was David Gear’s daughter as I know she brought up by her gradmother.
Today I stumped up to buy some credits to look at the newly-released 1911 census. It was money well spent! In 1911 Margaret was still living with David Gear and their 2 daughters, Christianna and Elizabeth. My grandmother appears living in her grandparents household, in the same village. Margaret can’t have stayed with her husband for long after that because she gave birth to Nancy in August 1913. There is no record of a marriage between her and James Osborne around the time of Nancy’s birth.
Her next marriage was to David Evans in 1917 where she used her maiden name to marry him in Bridgend. As far as I know David Gear was alive and kicking back in Swansea. Also, when a widow marries it is usual for her to give her married name and her maiden name is noted seperately. It looks as if she wanted to appear as a spinster when she married David Evans. After he died she married James Osborne (finally!) in 1923 and she appears as Margaret Ann Evans, formerly Stephens. Of course neither of these marriages was legal as, up to this time, I can find no record of David Gear’s death.
She strikes me as a woman who lived very much for the men in her life, rather than her children. My grandmother’s relationship with her was always strained and she had two other children that she completely walked away from. My uncle Sam apparently regarded my grandmother as more of a mother figure in his life rather than a sister. A little aside about Sam; until he joined the navy in the late 30s he had no idea he was an Evans, he’d always thought he was an Osborne and went by that name. It was only when he had to take his birth certificate to the recruiting office when he joined up that he found out his name was Sam Evans! In the end Margaret got religion in mid-life and converted to catholicism. It is supremely ironic (and not a little hypocritical) that she had at least 2 of her grandchildren baptised under their mothers’ maiden names because she felt that their marriages weren’t valid (either in law and/or the eyes of the Church). While I know for a fact that one of them wasn’t, it seems incredibly judgemental of her given her own history.
