Day Twenty Eight

The popular website Ancestry.com is proving to be quite an adventure, as I dive down increasingly unexpected rabbit-holes of my family history and usually end up resurfacing somewhere on Wikipedia where I find another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that leaves me wide-eyed in wonder at the perils of researching too deeply into the past.

A recent online adventure started with searching the records for Fitzmaurice Creighton,  my great grandfather, a colonel in the Royal Marines, born in Lymington, Hampshire in 1834, an outstanding horseman and with an eye for women that would eventually lead, so I had been told, to yet another scandal in the family.  The records on Ancestry.com at first sight seemed unexceptional.  Then I noticed something intriguing.  The Census Records of 1851 and 1881  show that he was born in 1834 or 1835, nothing too odd in that discrepancy, I thought.  But the Record for 1901 shows that he has mysteriously lost seven years and was born in 1841.  They also show that he now has a wife called Hilda B Hyde and one child, Vera.   In fact Fitzmaurice had another wife, Jane, who is not mentioned in that record and a number of children from that marriage including my grandfather John Henry David Creighton.

Fitzmaurice had married Hilda B. Hyde in 1895, at the age of sixty and had fathered Vera shortly after.  Hilda was only twenty-two.  It appears that Fitzmaurice may have conveniently shed a few years, perhaps telling the young Hilda that he was in his early fifties.  He was apparently very fit, very handsome and quite capable of getting away with this minor deception.  Quite endearing really.  The problem was that he had neglected to tell Hilda of his first wife Jane, who of course is my great grandmother and of the seven children he had fathered with her. Fitzmaurice was in fact a bigamist. And that was to have repercussions when the truth came out upon his death in 1913.  But that story is for another day.  In the meantime I decided to research further into Fitzmaurice's activities in Hampshire and the New Forest at the turn of the century.