Malcolm Smith's Family History Archive

Connections by marriage between the families of

BLENCOWE,  COOKE,  DEXTER,  MORRIS,  THOMAS and  TUCK

Timeline Thomas Blencowe Gertrude Cooke Alfred Dexter Clara Morris Emma Thomas Emma Tuck

 

A complex case of misleading registration
(Updated 24 February 2017)

 
This story came about as a result of my research into my maternal grandmother Vera Gwseeni Cook and her ancestry. I had her original marriage certificate giving her name as shown above and her father as Eldred Vernon Cook (deceased) who was noted as being a Draughtsman by profession. Also under her name she had later written Dexter to which I will return later.

Having that information and her date and place of birth which my mother told me, I went to look up the registration of her birth in order to obtain a certificate. My mother also told me that granny's middle name had been Gertrude after an aunt, but she had changed it to Gwseeni as she did not like it. Accordingly I looked up Vera Gertrude Cook, born in Stafford on 25 September 1887. That search did not yield a result, however, a more relaxed search found Gertrude Bentley Cooke at about the right place and date. The certificate was obtained and proved to be for my grandmother. She was the daughter of Albert James Cooke and Emma Cooke (née Thomas) which was at odds with the name of her father on her marriage certificate.

The surname Cooke also appears as Cook on some documentation. I have a 'rule of thumb' in that I usually take the name as given on the birth certificate as being correct and the one I use for biographies. I have applied this to Gertrude even though her marriage certificate stated Cook and she always wrote her name that way.

To clarify Gertude's names, I turned to the census returns. The 1891 census, being the first available after her birth, showed Gertrude Cooke and her widowed mother living with her mother's parents William J and Sarah Thomas and their family in Budbrooke near Stratford on Avon in Warwickshire. Knowing now that Gertrude's father had died between her birth in 1887 and the census of 1891, I searched for the registration. I found this as recorded in 1889 so I obtained the certificate which showed that Albert James Cooke had died from tuberculosis on 27 July that year aged only 24. Gertrude was not even two years old at that time. From there I went back to find the marriage of Alfred to Emma which was registered in 1886. The certificate showed that Albert James Cooke married Emma Thomas at the Presbyterian church in Stafford on Christmas Day that year. They were each aged 21 and were previously unmarried. So the name of Gertrude's father was now clearly established. Interestingly, whilst I was making these searches, I had a conversation with a friend about the discrepancy in the names. We also knew that Gertrude liked acting so my friend suggested that it was because she was theatrical that she had done it. It was that comment that opened my mind to that possibility.

It was known that Gertrude's mother Emma had remarried and that her new name was Dexter. Gertrude was found in the 1901 census living with her aunt Ada Parker in Stafford but Gertrude's mother was not present. Next was to find her mother's marriage and the registration was found for Wolverhampton in the second quarter in 1991. The certificate shows that Emma married bachelor Alfred Dexter at the Wolverhampton Register Office on 10 June 1891. She initially described herself as a spinster but immediately changed it to widow.

Looking into the background of Alfred Dexter, the census of 1891, taken only two months before he married Emma Cook, showed him living in Leicester with wife Emma and daughter Rose. So he wasn't a bachelor after all, but more of that later as I could not find the registration of an earlier marriage and did not follow it up at the time.

Alfred and Emma then went on to have six children between 1892 and 1905. Alfred went out to Canada to find work in 1906, then his family joined him the following year and they had another child in 1908. Gertrude was not with them and the 1911 shows her living alone in Cricklewood in London. She had registered herself as Vera Gwseeni Cook working as a Shop Assistant. Moreover, she described herself as an US citizen resident in England. Ten months later she married my grandfather, Sydney Newton Folker, giving her father's name as Eldred Vernon Cook, which we now knew to be totally untrue. The later entry of "Dexter" onto her marriage certificate now made sense as it was the married name of her mother. Although she seems not to have been in close contact with her mother since she remarried, she obviously felt the connection. There was correspondence between them and there certainly was contact after World War 2 when Emma's daughter Doris visited England with her husband Jim.

I continued my reserch in tracing the families of Albert Cook, Emma Thomas and Alfred Dexter to find siblings, parents and grandparents. Then it pretty well came to a standstill. I did not have much on the Dexter side of the family and had lost touch with the family of aunt Doris since my mother died. Ten years later I received an email from a genealogical researcher who had been commissioned to lookup the family of Alfred Dexter. It seemed apparent that he was working for relatives of Doris. He was kind enough to share some of the general information that he had found and, although I already had much of it but had not written it up, some was usefully new to me.

Most interesting in this new information was that the researcher noted that both Alfred Dexter and Emma Thomas had previously been married. This now added weight to what I had found about Alfred in the 1891 census but I still could not find registration of that marriage, so I remained stuck on that point. A major point that I did not know was that the whole family had emigrated to Canada and, more than that, I had not grasped the fact that some had moved on to Ohio.

Another seven years later, I decided to make some searches on the Dexter family on genealogy websites, concentrating this time on Canada. It was from that search that a nugget of information was found - the marriage of Alfred Dexter to Emma Tuck and the birth of their daughter Rose. I was now able to work through Emma Tuck's family and somehow incorrectly found a date of 1884. Knowing that Alfred had remarried in 1894, I looked for a possible remarriage for Emma. I found that she had married widower Thomas Blencowe on 1 July 1894 who had two children from his first marriage. I then found that his first wife was Clara Morris who had died in 1890. From there I was able to continue finding all their relatives from registrations and census returns.

I then had an email from Jack Wilson, son of Doris, who gave me much good detail of his side of the family. He was able to tell me that Alfred Dexter and Emma Tuck were never actually married. This was confirmed to me the same day when I received the birth certificate of their daughter Rose Elizabeth Tuck. This resolved the uncertainty of the marriage of her mother as the original registration was made as if she was married to Alfred but this later retracted by Statutory Declaration in 1911.

A search of marriage registrations found that Thomas Blencowe's first wife was Clara Morris whom he married in the Parish church of St.Marks in Wolverhampton on 31 December 1884. I think that is the date I may have muddled as being for Emma Tuck's possible first marriage. Clara and Thomas had three children before she died in 1890 at the time their child Thomas was born. The cause of death on her certificate is not fully legible but was due to a fever, probably associated with childbirth.

It is proving difficult to establish Clara's family. She was born in Bilston Staffordshire around 1886 according to her age on the census of 1871 but she was away from home at that time so her parents and siblings are not listed. There are seven possible birth registrations listed around 1866 of which two are the most likely. I have her father's name from her marriage certificate but there five possible families shown in the 1861 census.

There is one further story to complete. Having obtained the birth certificate of Rose Elizabeth, the daughter of Emma Tuck and Alfred Dexter, it has been established that she was born out of wedlock. According to the census of 1901, she appears to have been left in the care of her paternal grandparents when her mother married Thomas Blencowe. In 1911 she is unmarried and working as a servant. There was a marriage in 1913 of Rose E Dexter to William Francis Marston but that proved not to be Rose Elizabeth. There is another possibility of a marriage to George T Leach in Wolverhampton in 1918 but I can not find a death registration that would fit.