The Wastrel was a widower, but not for long – my great grandfather John Walden Poulson in 1901 was 31 with four young children and an earthenware manufactory to manage for his father (and owner) Edwin.

When I sent for the marriage certificate for his second marriage, I was puzzled as to why it took place in Newcastle-on-Tyne, a long way from Knottingley where he and his family lived. Even today, the train ride is nearly 3 hours. The marriage was on February 25, 1901, so this wasn’t some summer holiday lark. As far as I knew, no one in the Poulson family had anything to do with anyone in Newcastle.

I had already done enough digging to realize that the Emily Shepherd marrying John Walden Poulson was the younger sister of his deceased wife Polly (Mary Ann), but after the marriage certificate arrived I saw two more unusual details. The two witnesses were Edwin Llewellyn Poulson, John Walden’s father, and Emily, his stepmother. It was also at a Register Office, not a church.

The first wedding appeared to be all the bride’s family’s doing, but this time it looked like it was all his father, upstanding Edwin. Perhaps people were starting to gossip about the time the Wastrel and Emily were spending together, and Edwin, Justice of the Peace, member of the Pontefract Board of Guardians, Knottingley Urban District Council (etc.), didn’t want a scandal.

Emily was no stranger to turmoil and change. 1889 was a chaotic year for the Shepherd family. John Henry’s wife, Emily’s mother Ann, died in January. In April (didn’t take him long!), John Henry married again and moved with his new wife – but not his children – to the Red Lion Hotel in Ferrybridge which he ran. Emily at 18 with her sister Emma, 19, took care of their younger brother and sister (Alfred, 13, and Florence, 9), plus two boarders (a woman and her 6 year old daughter) at Argyle House in Ferrybridge. Possibly Mary Ann (Polly) helped out at first, but that December she was married (and pregnant) and now Mary Ann Poulson.

When Polly died in May 1899 Emily was 26 and certainly capable of helping out in caring for her nieces and nephew. My grandfather, the youngest, was not yet two, Polly’s oldest, Emily Muriel, was a strong student – later, in 1909, she did well and was awarded a scholarship to University in her Wakefield High School matriculation exams – so I’m assuming she focused on school work, not caring for the two babies.

Hard to guess how long it took with Emily helping out before one thing led to another, but once John Walden and Emily decided to marry, I’d have expected it to be locally – and in the Wesleyan church Edwin favored or St. Andrews Ferrybridge that was the Shepherds’ village church.

A little more digging revealed that the jaunt to Newcastle was all about working around a problem that would be solved six years later with the passage of the The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act 1907. In 1901, the church considered a sister-in-law to be the equivalent of a sister and thus off limits for marriage. It’s a bit of a puzzle as to why a closer city wouldn’t have been OK, but perhaps leaving Yorkshire for Northumberland seemed to offer the best chance of no one knowing or noticing Emily being Mary Ann’s sister.

John Walden gave his real address on the marriage certificate, but Emily said she lived at 19 Guildford Place Newcastle. The census showed that was the home of George Warren and his family. At first I saw no connection between George Warren (who was born in Durham, not Yorkshire, although his wife was from Yorkshire, though not Knottingley/Ferrybridge/Pontefract) and Shepherds or Poulsons. For a while I assumed the connection was George’s business – he was a glass bottle manufacturer and there were several large ones in Ferrybridge.

Some time later I was cleaning up details in the family tree and noticed  one of John Henry Shepherd’s sisters didn’t have a death date. Yet another Mary Ann – Emily’s aunt. Mary Ann Shepherd married George Warren, a man from a Bristol glass blowing family, in 1854 and they settled in Newcastle. In 1860, they had a son George – Emily Shepherd’s cousin. Emily’s address on her marriage certificate is her cousin George and his wife Mary Jane’s home. The picture at the top is from a few doors down on Guildford Place today (courtesy of Google Street View) – there are modern flats where #19 used to be and the remaining terraced houses look about right for the time, so will do as stand ins.

Here’s an Ancestry “family group” modified to include both wives and all the children, which may help to keep track of the Wastrel’s brood.

I hope Emily was happy for the short time she and John Walden were together – it was just nine years before he left them all and went to Canada. She was aunt/stepmother to Polly’s four children plus Emily gave birth to two daughters, Millicent Mary in 1902 and Ethel Suzanne in 1905. When John Walden left in 1910, Emily sent her daughters to live with her father, John Henry, and the two youngest of Polly’s children to their Aunt Mary’s in Portsmouth (Mary was John Walden’s older sister who had married a solicitor).

I have yet to find Emily in the 1911 census (and I’ve checked all her family members’ census records). I’m guessing that she wasn’t well and may have been in a sanitarium somewhere – she died from tuberculosis in 1917, age 44, at home in Ferrybridge, with 15 year old Millicent Mary (who went on to become a registered nurse) looking after her. There’s no indication that she ever saw John Walden again, even though he returned from Canada in 1916. Once again, the Wastrel was a widower, for a short while…