Several years ago I visited the Derbyshire Record Office in Matlock, and one of the items I found there was the will of James Waterall, Mike’s great-great-great-grandfather. Interestingly, even though he had ten children, only eight of them were mentioned in the will. I wondered why his remaining his two daughters, Ann Waterall and Harriet Waterall Wild, were left out of the will, especially since they survived their father and the heirs of their deceased sister Dorothy Waterall Heath (Mike’s great-great-grandmother) were included in the will.
Recently I started looking through the British newspapers available on findmypast.com, and made some discoveries that may explain the reason for this omission, at least in the case of Ann Waterall. The first was an article describing a breach of promise lawsuit, which until the 20th century was a way for a woman to receive compensation for a broken engagement/promise of marriage. At the time when the article was written, a promise of marriage was treated like a binding contract and if the party who had promised marriage (almost always the man) broke their promise the wronged party could take them to court.
Ann Waterall brought legal action for £1000 in damages against her lover Jacob Redfern Milward, a wealthy man almost 15 years her senior. According to the article, Jacob had repeatedly promised to marry her but had always come up with some excuse about why he could not marry at the present moment. His mother’s health featured prominently in his excuses, yet despite his assertions that his mother was at death’s door she proved remarkably resilient. Nine years, two children and two legal actions later, Ann had enough and seemed to catch on that she was being strung along. For her trouble, Ann eventually got £50 and never did wind up marrying Jacob.
Ann remained unmarried for the rest of her life and continued living with her parents until both of them had passed away. She had two children from her relationship with Jacob: Alexander Saunders Waterall (1868 – 1947) and Mary Ann Waterall (1872 – 1913), who wound up leading very different lives. Alexander, nicknamed “Alec”, led a relatively normal life, working in the I & R Morley cloth-weaving factory in Heanor, Derbyshire for many years, marrying and having a daughter, and was featured in an article in a county newspaper describing his passion for sports and the longevity of his parents (who conveniently were not named).
Unfortunately his sister Mary Ann led a very different life as both she and her daughter Lily appeared to be suffering from a mental illness or a developmental delay. They were described as “feebleminded from birth” on the 1911 UK census. It is not clear what medical condition they had, however Mary Ann was clearly not able to live a normal life. Soon after birth of Lily (whose father is unknown), Mary Ann was involved in several court cases for aggressive behavior, firstly for hitting a young girl and then for attacking the girl’s mother, Elizabeth “Betsy” Clarke, with a brick.
According to an article describing the latter case, her lawyer described her as “one of those girls that villagers took advantage of by shouting and getting her cross” and her mother Ann mentioned that the woman she attacked had taunted her and called her a “lunatic”. As it was agreed that Mary Ann was provoked she was only fined 10 shillings. Mary Ann eventually was committed to the Derby County Lunatic Asylum for several months and died when she was only 40 years old.
I suspect that Ann’s dalliance with Jacob may have disgraced the family in the eyes of her father James, which resulted in her being left out of the will even though she was living with her father when he died. I still do not have a theory why her sister Harriet was not included, but suspect there maybe another story out there to discover.