Very interesting Roy. I suspect your theory about bigamy could be correct as I have never found Ann's death, and there are all sorts of 'mysteries' around this family generally. I am almost sure that John STRAFFORD was born in Conisbrough, son of Joshua and Elizabeth STRAFFORD, but the parish register lists his father as Richard. I have not been able to trace John and his new wife after the birth of their children, although one died in the area in 1832, and two of John and Ann's children married in Scrooby in the 1820s. I have over the years found a lot of information about this family, but sometimes the more I find, the more questions arise! Thank you for the information Regards Margaret On 14 Aug 2007, at 10:18, Roy Stockdill wrote: A private Act of Parliament was required to obtain a divorce until 1858, so obviously it was a device only available to the extremely wealthy and well connected. After after 1858, divorce for ordinary people was still virtually impossible because of the expense. It did not really become an option for most people until legal aid became available in the 1920s. Having personally uncovered at least three cases of bigamy in the course of my researches that no-one, as far as I am aware, had ever found before - one involving the great-grandfather of Dame Judi Dench and another my own wife's great-grandmother - I am of the opinion that bigamy was far more common in Victorian times than we imagine. In the case of Judi Dench, her gt-grandfather, a customs officer, left his wife and six kids in Weymouth and lived with another woman, a widow, in Battersea, South London, with whom he had two more children and then underwent a bigamous marriage in 1887, calling himself a widower on the certificate. This was clearly a lie because his legal wife was still very much alive on the census in Weymouth in 1891 and 1901 and, in fact, outlived him by a good many years. In my wife's case her gt-grandmother left her husband and children to live with a younger man and underwent a bigamous marriage in 1898 at Coventry, describing herself as a spinster and giving the name of her legitimate husband - who was still alive in 1901 - as her father! The foregoing cases have been published in magazines, BTW, so I am not revealing anything that's not already known. My point is that people had probably lied to their new partners about being widowed and, being under pressure from the second partner to marry, had no hope of getting a divorce and so went through a bigamous marriage. I am confident that as research becomes easier with all the GRO Indexes and the Victorian censuses now online, more and more cases will turn up. -- Roy Stockdill Editor, Journal of One-Name Studies Guild of One-Name Studies website: www.one-name.org Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History: www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to WEST-RIDING- request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message