2
« on: Thursday 31 October 13 16:43 GMT (UK) »
Many thanks, Brian, for getting back to me and giving me the reference to the court case. It sounds as if I have been reading too much into the situation after looking at the earlier Bradley family wills, but I will look forward to seeing the papers anyway. Have you seen the wills too? I can give you the references to them in the National Archives if you haven't.
Your earlier notes on the Bradley family on this website - both to the generation that William David and Charlotte (Martelli) belong to, and to the children of William David and Mary (Halpin) - were really helpful to me as I was putting together the Martelli family history. Thanks for all of that too. Ours was one of those 'trunk in the attic' stories where my wife and I found all kinds of material relating to the family just before her mother Mary (the older of Howard Martelli's two children) died a couple of years ago. As I was trying to solve the puzzle of how Howard was brought up after he was effectively 'orphaned' in the early 1900s I started seeing the links between him and his two orphaned Bradley orphans, Willie and Doris, who were all about the same age. (I thought until I got your reply that you were a descendant of Doris's and wondered whether some of the information about how the three of them were brought up by their aunt Maria might be of direct interest to you too. Let me know if you have gaps there that I might be able to fill.)
There are a few more things that I am trying to piece together that you might be able to help with. I am pretty sure, working from some old school photos, that Willie Bradley and Howard went to boarding school together at Trent College in Nottinghamshire around 1912-13, but that Willie didn't stay there for long. Might have have been some earlier family link with Trent College? Howard went straight from school in 1915 into the Sherwood Foresters and joined World War 1 on the Western Front, just in time for the battle of the Somme... Do you know if Willie returned to Ireland? They seem to have linked up again in Ireland after the war, before Willie moved to England and Howard went to the North.
And Charlotte Bradley/Martelli's life after she left Dublin for London in the early 1900s is a mystery until the 1911 census, where I found her again, living in a boarding house. She and Howard appear to have reestablished contact while he was in school in England. Maybe she also had contact with some of her other Bradley relatives in England over these years?
All the best,
Dennis