Gail has sent me your queries about the Crowther-Wilkinsons and I have a large amount of information!!! George William was my great grandfather and my mother was able to fill in a lot of gaps in the information added to all the things from Australia. We didn't know that she had any cousins in Oz until my cousin's husband was looking something up on the White pages and asked her if she had relatives there! Her sister contacted Frank and that led to ......!
I am still trying to find out why George William went to Bangor and there aren't any concrete things to say why but it would seem that he volunteered for the Militia. I, too have a gap when he was in his 20's but newly found cousin Shirley sent me a lot of photos and there is one of him obviously abroad. He moved to Portsmouth to be in the Royal Marines and was a Physical Instructor in Bangor, North Wales.
I have a copy of George's enlistment paper -the only surviving paper for him (I had a professional searcher looking for things as could not make any headway with the ADMs etc). He gave his age as 19 but he was, in fact, 15 and was born on the 5th May 1844. The difficulty in tracing his birth certificate was the he was born Crowther and not Wilkinson! He enlisted as a Wilkinson and my theory is that he did not want to be associated with his father, Jonathon Crowther, who had given fictitious accounts to the Times newspaper (he was a Times Correspondent) and was given the sack. I went to the Times archives and copied out the 7 letters sent to him. He probably did it as his wife had died and he was left with a very young family of 10 children.
If you can let me have an address I can send on a lot of the information. You can also see the research on the Crowther ancestors done by the Makinsons on their website.
http://home.comcast.net/~makinson/index.htm and then go into the family tab to Crowther. We had got stuck on Wilkinson as that was given as father's name on GW. marriage certificate and the Makinsons had got stuck on the descendents of Jonathon Crowther!
