Mr. Taylor, I Presume?

John Joseph Taylor, Mike’s great-grandfather, has a somewhat deceptive name and the story behind his parentage is another instance where a member of Mike’s family appears to come back from the dead.

When I first started to research John Joseph Taylor, his father was proving incredibly elusive. I knew that his mother Hannah Farrow (whose complicated ancestry seemed to pale in comparison to her son’s), had married (or at least claimed to have married) at least twice. By the time of the 1871 UK census, her first husband, a Mr. Taylor, was dead, leaving Hannah a widow with one daughter, Jane Elizabeth. However, over the next ten years, Mr. Taylor seemed to have returned from the dead quite regularly to sire more children. This continued until 1886, with Hannah giving birth to five additional Taylors (Fanny, William, the aforementioned John Joseph, Harry and Mary Ellen) and although she eventually married again (a Mr. Frances, with whom she had a daughter, Eliza) by the 1891 UK census, he didn’t seem to be the father of her other children.

I ordered John Joseph’s birth certificate to see if it would help with finding his father, but to my disappointment the father’s name was left off the birth entry in the registry book. Perhaps it had been Mr. Taylor’s ghost after all.

While the birth entry in the register had not been much help, I was hoping that John Joseph’s marriage entry would provide more information on his father. I was in luck, as it gave the father’s name as “Joseph Woodhead Taylor (deceased)”, with the occupation of “Coal Miner”. While the surname seemed a bit suspect (as Mr. Taylor had died long before John Joseph was born), it  provided a lead towards his father’s identity. Since the name of his father was not given when his birth was registered, he had to be reasonably sure of his father’s identity to put his name down (albeit with a fake surname) when he got married.

After searching for a “Joseph Woodhead Taylor” to no avail, I tried the variant “Joseph Woodhead” and struck gold. Who turned up but a Mr. Joseph Woodhead of Clowne, coal miner and “employer” to John Joseph’s mother, Hannah (Farrow) Taylor.

Presumably, Joseph Woodhead was the biological father of Joseph and at least some of the other Taylor children born after 1871, but it is the Taylor name they carry despite being as related to the prolific Mr. Taylor as myself (that is, not at all).