I have previously written about the complicated relationship history of Mike’s great-great-grandmother Hannah Farrow, but soon after starting to research her and her many gentleman callers I discovered that she was not the first one in the family to have an aversion to marriage.
Like her son John Joseph Taylor, Hannah was also born out of wedlock, but unlike many “base born” children her father did not leave her mother. Hannah’s mother Elizabeth Farrow, herself born out of wedlock in Misson, Nottinghamshire to Charlotte Farrow of Lound, Nottinghamshire, met John Hutchinson about 1838. John was from the nearby village of Mattersea, Nottinghamshire, and Elizabeth soon had two children with him (William and Ann), but it was not the time for marriage bells yet. John appears to be AWOL during the 1841 census as Elizabeth was living without him with her mother and their two children in Lound.
By the 1851 UK census she had reunited with John. The couple moved to Clowne, Derbyshire and had two more children, George and Hannah, and their last child, John, was born a year after that census.
The Hutchinson-Farrows on the 1851-1881 UK censuses. They’ve declared themselves to be husband and wife in 1851 and 1881 but appear as unmarried in 1861 and 1871.John and Elizabeth had claimed to be married that year, but they went back to being unmarried on the two subsequent censuses and back to married in 1881. I had given up on finding a marriage record for them due to their competing claims – I could not find a marriage record around the time they first claimed to have married, and all of their children had kept Elizabeth’s maiden name as their surname, despite showing up with the surname Hutchinson in 1851.
Earlier this year, a search of findmypast.com’s newspaper archive struck gold.
Our wily couple DID get around to marrying and thus weren’t lying about living in wedded bliss in 1881, as they had tied the knot about a month earlier to be eligible for poor relief assistance from their parish. Elizabeth’s name was misspelled as “Farrar” in the BMD index, explaining why I could not find their marriage earlier. The couple lived together until Elizabeth passed away in 1888, and John lived with family members until he died in 1897.