This is going to be brief because Heather knows almost nothing about her mother’s family, Her mother never told her anything, and what little she does know comes from Uncle Angus, her father James‘s youngest brother.
The girl whom James (“Sonny”) married was Joyce Irene Seymour, but Joyce’s mother was a Mrs Coe, “probably a second marriage” according to Angus.
Heather thinks her mother never spoke about her family because she was enthralled by the Sharpes, especially her mother-in-law. It wasn’t just Sonny she fell in love with. On the other hand she may have been embarrassed by her family compared with the self-confident, haut-bourgeois Sharpes, or perhaps her childhood had simply been unhappy.
In any case Angus was right. Joyce’s mother had married twice, to a James Seymour and a Joseph Coe, and unfortunately there is precious little hard data about either man.
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The UK census of April 1911 has James Seymour, a builder’s foreman, living on First Avenue, Paddington, London, with a Mr and Mrs Leighton, their three children and two other boarders.
Later that year, the Church of England’s marriage records show James Seymour marrying Rosa Ricketts, Heather’s grandmother, in St Jude’s Church, not far away on Lancefield Street in the parish of Kensal Green. James’s father is recorded as William Seymour (deceased), and both James and his bride living — or perhaps intending to live — at 11 Herries St, London.
And that’s as much as I know about James, except that he had three children with Rosa —two girls and a little boy who died in infancy — and that he himself died while the girls were still very young. What happened to him I don’t know. Perhaps he died late in the war, although you’d think the family might remember something like that. Those two records aren’t enough by themselves to identify James with any certainty, and all I can find about his family is that one mention of his deceased father. The birth records of his children record only the mother’s maiden name. Ancestry.com routinely floods you with “hints” about any new person you add to a family tree, but even ancestry.com is mute.
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We do have is a second piece of solid data, the UK census of June 1921, which has Rosa apparently remarried, to an older man, Joseph Coe, an Insurance Official working for the Motor Union Insurance Co. Ltd. The two little girls living with them — Rosa’s daughters by James Seymour — are listed as Joseph’s stepdaughters, and their anonymous father as “dead”.
According to the census, Rosa was coming up to 37 years old, and Joseph Coe was 51 years 6 months, implying that he was born in December 1869. In their case I can’t find any record of their marriage.
Once again a single data point, the census, supported in this case by a few photographs with Rosa, aren’t enough to identify Joseph with certainty. Nevertheless hints abound for Joseph Coe, and I’m pretty sure that he was born in the first quarter of 1870, and that his parents were Dorothy Wilson and a Wesleyan minister, Robert Summerside Coe.
Assuming I have the right man, Joseph Coe died in 1936, the same year Joyce and Sonny married, so, in the main, Angus probably knew Rosa Ricketts, Mrs Coe after she’d become a widow for the second time, with a tobacconist and sweet shop her means of support.