Ignoble Gentry

Emily Bond was born in Rivenhall in the summer of 1850 and christened in the baptismal font under the magnificent stained glass of St Mary's & All Saints.  She was the sixth daughter and the ninth and youngest child of Thomas Bond and Ann Isaacs.  I'm sure she spent an idyllic childhood in rural Essex, with all the benefits her labourer father and illiterate mother could give a child...let's just be glad that, unlike some of her siblings, she survived childhood.  Now let's skip ahead to 1871.  Because this story isn't about Emily's childhood, but her marriage.  Or marriages.  Or her husband's marriages.

On 21 July 1871 at St Mary's & All Saints, in front of the Rev. Bradford D. Hawkins who brought back from Europe the aforementioned stained glass, Emily pledged her troth etc. to Henry Gentry.  Henry was 22 to Emily's 21 and, I was delighted to note from the marriage record, a photographer!  Were there photos to be found of Emily, and perhaps some of her parents, too?  I went to look for Emily on the 1881 census and found that she'd dropped off the face of the earth.  Henry was there, same age, birthplace and occupation as on the marriage register, but with a new wife.  Poor Emily had died young.

The 1881 census did suggest that she'd left behind some small children: her mother Ann, by then a widow, had two little boys living in her household in Rivenhall.  The elder, Henry T. Gentry, was 9 and described as Ann's nephew; the younger, William Gentry, was 6 months old and described as Ann's grandson.  Both were born in Rivenhall.  Further research revealed that either the census taker had goofed or Ann had given the wrong information: Henry Thomas Gentry was the son of Henry Gentry and Emily Bond, so Ann's grandson, and had been born in Rivenhall on 3 March 1872.  Of William's birth, however, I could find no trace*.  Maybe the census taker confused the two and Henry was Ann's grandson and William was a nephew.  Emily probably died giving birth to Henry; shame that I couldn't find the record.

In 1891 William was living with Emily's sister Lydia (Mrs Thomas Clark) in Pebmarsh.  He joined the Royal Navy in 1898, giving his birth details as 15 September 1880 in Walthamstow (although no birth record confirms this), but was discharged due to poor health in the spring of 1901.  He returned to Pebmarsh where he died of phthisis (great for Scrabble!) early the next year, aged only 21.  Emily's line didn't seem to be a robust one.  And I still couldn't find where and when she died.

I went back to look at her husband and his new family.  He'd made quite a leap from Essex in 1871 to Leeds by 1872, or at least Leeds was the residence he gave when he married Marianne Powell in Presteigne, Radnorshire, Wales on 23 July 1872.  Wow.  That was a quick recovery from the apparent loss of his wife four months earlier.

I researched Henry Gentry's life, following him from house to house, through censuses, church records, business directories and finally his probate record.  He and Marianne had a family of eight: two daughters, six sons.  One of their sons was named Goldon Samuel, a family name common in the Isaacs family, so perhaps some kind of tribute to his former in-laws.

Trouble was, Henry's marriage record to Marianne said that he was a bachelor when it should have said widower.  I mean, Emily was dead, right?  Also, the probate of Henry's will in 1923 named his executrix as Marianne Powell, spinster: if he meant his wife, she hadn't been a spinster since they married in 1872.  I could imagine a little detail like that leading to some pretty pointed questions, except that Henry was dead and didn't have to answer them.  Nice move.

I started to look for Emily after her disappearance, searching for all the Emilys (Emilies?) born in Rivenhall around 1850 and trying to identify each of them.  Only one was unaccounted for: Emily, wife of Samuel Cecil Gray.  Try as I might, I couldn't find when or where they married, so using a marriage record to prove her identity was impossible.  My curiosity grew when I found that their eldest child, born in 1881, was named Amy Constance -- Emily's sister Lydia (my great-great-great-grandmother) also had a daughter named Amy Constance, born in 1882.  The name didn't appear elsewhere in the family tree.  I ordered Amy Constance Gray's birth certificate and there was her mother's full name: Emily Gray late Gentry formerly Bond.  I had the right person.

Still no marriage record, though. 

The 1911 Census of England and Wales is known as the fertility census because it asked married women to list the number of children they'd had in their present marriage, how many were still living and how many had died.  The census also asked married couples how many completed years their present marriage had lasted.  Samuel and Emily replied that they had been married for 30 full years and were the parents of 8 children, 7 of whom were still living.  That suggested a marriage around 1880 - the year William Gentry was born in Walthamstow.  Emily and Samuel's other seven children could be accounted for in 1911: was William their eighth?  Until I can figure out where his birth was registered - if his birth was registered, I can't say for certain, but it seems reasonable.

Henry and Marianne Gentry also responded to the census taker, saying that they'd been married for 38 completed years, which matched their 1872 marriage certificate, and that they'd had 8 children together, 6 of whom were still living.  That also matched the information I'd found on them.

So what happened in 1872? The 7 1/2 months between their 21 July 1871 marriage to the arrival of their son on 3 March 1872 suggest that Henry and Emily had to get married, and presumably decided to do so very quickly, as Emily wouldn't have long known that she was pregnant.  Emily registered the child's birth on 4 April 1872.  Henry might already have left by then: since he married again on 23 July 1872, presumably he'd been away for however long he needed to get to know someone well enough to marry her.  Or maybe women just fell into his arms.  Here's Henry: you be the judge --

Henry Gentry.  Mmmmm...

Were both men really the same person?  I went back to the start, back to Henry's birth in Bocking, Essex in 1848, son of Charles Gentry and Sarah Hitching, and worked my way forwards, tracking down every Henry Gentry born in Essex +/- five years from 1848, winding up at the same conclusion: there was just the one who fits both profiles, who was born in Bocking around 1848, whose father was a blacksmith named Charles and who became a photographer.

I've spent plenty of time pouring over Henry's signature on his marriage record to Emily Bond and his signature on the 1911 census, and there are more similarities than differences:

Henry's signatures: 1871 (top) and 1911 (bottom)

Despite the passage of 40 years, there are plenty of similarities.

There are also significant differences.

Some letters might look different, but closer inspection shows that similar penstrokes were used.

(I do have his 1872 marriage to Marianne Powell, but the copies ordered from the General Records Office are just that: copies.  The registrar copies the information off the original register and sends his version to the central repository.  If I wanted to check Henry's original signature from 1872, I'd have to go to the Powys County Archives, which is a bit out of the way.)

Bigamy wasn't as uncommon as we'd like to think; in fact, it was a practical alternative to divorce, which really was available only to the wealthy.  The documentary evidence suggests that Henry and Emily married in haste, repented in even greater haste, and went their separate ways.  Did his second wife even know?  If she didn't, being referred to as a spinster in his will would have brought her up to speed.

On of the fun things about genealogy is how the passage of time and advance of technology allows us to step back and take an overview of a situation, rather like zooming out on Google maps and encompassing all of England and Wales in one frame, then seeing where your family ran away and tried to start over. 

I'd love to find someone who was descended from either of these couples and who could let me know what, if anything, the family knew or suspected.  Here, then, to attract plenty of hits from anyone looking for their relatives, are the details:

Henry Gentry, b. 1848 at Bocking, Essex; d. 12 November 1921 at 359 Camden Road, Islington, London.
Samuel Cecil Gray, b. 1849 at Barnstaple, Devon; d. 3 March 1929 at 86 George Street, Hove, Sussex.
Marianne Powell, b. 1850 at Presteigne, Radnorshire; d. 29 April 1928 at 359 Camden Road, Islington, London.
Emily Bond, b. 1850 at Rivenhall, Essex; d. 3 October 1925 at 86 George Street, Hove, Sussex.

Child of Emily Bond & Henry Gentry, who married 21 July 1871 at Rivenhall:

• Henry Thomas Gentry (1872-195), married Louise Maud Mary Codner 18 August 1900 (his marriage record said that his father was Henry Gentry, Artist, deceased).  Two daughters.

Children of Henry Gentry & Marianne Powell, who married 23 July 1872 at Presteigne, Radnorshire:

• Lilian Annie Margaret Gentry, 1874-1960, m. Alfred Charles Baker, 1 son, 1 daughter
• Harry Frederick Gentry, 1876-1952, m. Helen Hankins, 2 daughters
• Goldon Samuel Gentry, 1878-1964, m. (1) Lucy May Aston, 1 daughter; m. (2) Ida May Anderson
• Ernest Gentry, 1880-1880
• Cecil Gentry, 1881-1968, m. Elizabeth Charlotte Mockridge, 2 daughters, 1 son
• Claude Gentry, 1882-1962, m. (1) Nellie Rose Katie Bleakley in 1902 (she died 1963), 3 daughters, 2 sons; m. (2) Winifred Charlotte Townsend in 1915 (yes, Claude followed in his father's footsteps and left one wife and married another without stopping to get divorced first: was it because he'd seen a successful example?), 3 daughters, 3 sons; m. (3) Cornelia Olive MacDonald
• Sidney Gentry, 1887-1938
• Ethel Marian Gentry, 1889-1889

Children of Emily Bond & Samuel Cecil Gray, who lived as spouses since circa 1880:

• Samuel William Gray aka William Gentry, 1880-1902
• Amy Constance Elizabeth Gray, 1881-1933
• January Stanley Isaac Gray, 1883-died likely between 1927 and 1932
• Muriel Emily Beatrice Gray, 1885-1916, married James Alfred Nunn, one daughter
• Percy John March Gray, 1886-before 1927
• Frederick Ernest Samuel Gray, 1888-1949
• Emily Olive Eveline Pierce Gray, 1889-1965, married Walter Hollis
• Geraldine Elsie Mary Gray, 1891-1954, married (1) Harold Charles Creighton (sep.), two sons; partner (2) Herbert George Baker

Updated 19 and 25 March 2017 with further details of the middle names and marriages of the various children of Emily and Henry.

*25 March 2017: I have received the birth certificate of Samuel William Gray aka William Gentry confirming that he was indeed the son of Samuel Gray, draper, and Emily 'Gray formerly Bond', born 17 September 1880 in Walthamstow.