Thanks Gadget but, sadly, the adoptive parents were not Daniel and Bridget.
The history as we know it, a good deal of which comes from an aged great-aunt with quite a good line in historical embellishment, is as follows:
Catherine, if that was indeed her name at birth, was born in Salford or Hulme (although there is also a suggestion of a connection with Rochdale) in or around 1869. She was the daughter, we are told, of a young Welsh girl who was in service in the area. Her surname may have been Roberts. Apparently the Welsh girl had “a liaison" with the son of a nobleman who was visiting the house at which she worked. She fell pregnant and had the child. For whatever reason she and the father were, at some point later, in a caravan in the grounds of the house when a fire killed them both. The child (who we know as Catherine) was taken back to Wales and brought up by William Morgan and his wife. His wife is probably the mother (by an earlier marriage) of the girl who gave birth to Catherine. Hence we heavily suspect that the people who brought her up were her maternal grandmother and her second husband, whose surname she took. They are shown as a family in the 1881 Census.
Even allowing for 50% of it to be embellished you would think we had enough to find her but, to date, she has eluded us.
We are looking for:
a) Who was her mother?
b) In what name, if at all, was she registered
c) What was the house in which her mother was in service?
d) When, if legend is correct, were her parents killed
We are hoping that by finding her actual date of birth we can search the local parish records for the correct area and the correct period to find a possible birth certificate which might move our research on a little bit!!
