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Why can’t I find Susan Jordan’s first marriage?
Q My great grandfather, Robert Long, who was a widower, married Susan Jordan, a widow, on 17 September 1882. The marriage took place at All Saints, Newington (Walworth). On their wedding certificate, it records Susan’s father as being called James Manley. I assume this means that Manley was her maiden name. However, I haven’t been able to trace a marriage record for Susan and her previous spouse.
A When trying to overcome a brick wall, all possibilities (however unlikely) should be explored. As it was possible, if improbable, that Susan at just 21 had been widowed twice, I searched the General Register Office (GRO) indexes (www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content) for Susan Manley marriages and noted the various spouses’ surnames. Using those surnames, I undertook a further search for any Susan who had married someone with the surname Jordan. I examined the period 1873–1881, since Susan may have been quite young when she married for the first time (the minimum age for marriage was not raised to 16 until 1929). To allow for a possible error in the GRO indexes, I extended my search to several family history websites, but all to no avail.
It is important to remember that errors can occur, even in original records. So if you can’t find an expected event, you should attempt to verify the source information. With this in mind, I searched the records of All Saints, Walworth. The information in the marriage register matches that on the GRO marriage certificate and states that Robert Long’s bride was Susan Jordan, widow, daughter of James Manley (deceased). However, the banns book records that the banns of “Robert Long, widower of the parish of Bermondsey and Susan Gorden, spinster of this parish” were called. The discrepancies between the records, Susan’s surname and marital status, suggest that she had not previously been married and provide an alternative surname spelling.
There are two possible reasons why Susan’s surname differs from that of her father. Either she was born Susan Gorden/Jordan, her mother remarried after her father’s death and she supplied her stepfather’s name, or she was born Susan Manley but assumed the surname of her stepfather.