Biography of Lilian Kate BROWN
[Ref. R.24]
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Biography |
Biography of Lilian Kate BROWN
[Ref. R.24]
| Profile | |
Chart | |
Biography |
Tracing the antecedance of Aunty Lil, my father's sister-in-law, proved much more difficult than I had expected. I only met her a few times in later life when I had taken an interest in our family history and had never been able to elicit much information from her. All she had told me was that her father was Farmer Brown. My mother had told me that my father's brother Harvey had bought a small roadside hotel in Willoughby in Northamptonshire and that Lilian was a chambermaid there.
With so litle information, my initial move was to find the record of her marriage which I found registered in Daventry in 1941. I obtained her marriage cerificate which gave her age as being 20 and her father as being Frederick Thomas Brown (deceased), an Agricultural labourer.
Next I searched the birth registers for the period around 1921 and the most likely entry was in Rugby in 1921, although the mother's maiden name was listed as Brown. I sent off for the birth cerificate but this showed that she had been born out of wedlock to Florence May Brown. As that did not match the details of her marriage certificate and there was no other likley birth registration, I was stumped.
No progress was made until many years later following a conversation with my cousin, Lilian's daughter Joan. I was asking her what she knew about her mother's family and, although she admitted to knowing very little, she did tell me that her grandmother's maiden name was Malvina Montgomery. That was the key that unlocked the box. Shortly afterwards, my cousin also gave me a list of her mother's brothers and sisters as told to her by a cousin whose mother was one of those sisters.
My next move was to find the marriage of Frederick Thomas Brown and Malvina Montgomery which I found registered in 1902. From this I was able to search for the birth of their children. The census of 1911 listed the family up to that time then searching the birth registrations with the mother's maiden name thereafter produced the remainder.
However, Lilian's name did not appear in the list of children, but that of her mother Florence did. Florence was the eldest child of Frederick and Malvina Brown and Lilian Kate was her daughter.
That solved the mystery but opened up more questions. Was Lilian aware of her birth or had she been brought up as a sister of her own mother? In order to try to complete the information already discovered, I obtained the marriage cerificate of Lilian's mother Florence May Brown which revealed that Lilian's husband, Harvey Thomas Smith, was a witness at the wedding along with Florence's mother Malvina. The wedding had taken place on the same day as that of Harvey and Lilian so I compared the certificates which showed that Florence and her new husband, John Forster, had witnessed the marriage of Harvey and Lilian immediately after their own wedding.
These new facts then threw some light onto the first two children born to Lilian and Harvey prior to their wedding. The birth of both had been registered in the name of their mother but were re-registered in their father's name after his wedding. The unanswered question is that did Lilian and Harvey hold off their wedding deliberately until Florence had married or did Florence herself maintain the secret of being mother to Lilian and find another reason to arrange marriage prior to her daughter.
That is not the whole story. Searches of birth registrations revealed that Florence had a son, a brother to Lilian, born five years later. The list of names given to my cousin had included this son Leslie as being a brother to Florence so it seems that both children were brought up in ignorance of the circumstances of their birth.
In order to round off the known facts of this family, I researched the records of all the children of Frederick and Malvina Brown. An interesting point came to light in that Florence and her sister Edith Nellie each had a husband with the surname Forster. Florence had married widower John Forster when she was 34 years old and he was 58. Edith had married George Henry Forster who was actually the son of John and they had married earlier the same year, she being 22 and he 20.
The discovery of all this information carried a complication in that it was likely that my cousin Joan was unaware of the circumstances of her mother's birth and I did not want to be the one to reveal it to her.
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