Just to make it a little easier for anyone who wants to help, here's some information from Marie's tree at Ancestry:
The death registration for William Gordon Jacobs indicates he was married first to M. Campbell in America c1854 at age 23 and second to M. Smith c1860 at age 29. His parents are listed as William and Ann Jacobs. He was in Lyttleton, New Zealand prior to moving to the Chatham Islands in Mar 1866. He married his third wife Jesse Seymour nee Martin in Oct 1866. The death registration says he was born in America. William was a carpenter as was his father.
Jacquie
P.S. Do you have copies of all of the articles from the "incident" in 1882? There are a bunch of them at Papers Past if you don't (http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz). It's quite fascinating.
LOL! Yes, thanks, I have all of the newspaper stories from Papers Past. I don't mind discussing it. See below.
First, though, the names we have for William Gordon Jacobs' first two wives may or may not be correct. I have not been shown any verification, and the source is unreliable. It is definite, though, that he married twice before coming to New Zealand. Somehow, (nobody has shown me any evidence) we know that his first wife died - probably in child birth as she was very young. He may well have still been married to his second wife when he came to New Zealand. We have no evidence, and there are no family stories about this. It is highly likely they were American women, according to family stories, and I have found a document which indicates (I think) his father moving the family to Maine after Hannah's (his mother's) death, when William Gordon would have been 6 years old. His mother's name was Hannah Jacobs nee Olmsted.
William Gordon Jacobs came to New Zealand as part of a ship's crew - ship's carpenter - and was based in Lyttelton as a builder, where he met and married the widow Jessie Seymour nee Martin and took over the role of father to her three sons to Seymour. Their first (Jacobs) son was born before the marriage - my great grandfather William Walter Jacobs. Shortly after William's birth in 1866, the family moved to the Chatham Islands. William and Jessie married later that same year.
The Chatham Islands were/are a very isolated group of small islands in the Pacific, about 500 miles off the east coast of New Zealand. The story is that (my 2xgreat grandmother) Jessie had refused to have "relations" with her husband because her last child (of 10 children) was born with Downes Syndrome. William (my 2xgreat grandfather) thought she must be having an affair. They fought, and Jessie moved out to stay with a neighbour. Another contributing factor was that Jessie's oldest Seymour son had run away with the young maori wife of one of William's close friends, and William and Jessie were bitterly divided over this.
William was a heavy drinker, and one night about three weeks after Jessie moved out, he was walking home from the pub, highly intoxicated, and passed the house where Jessie was staying. He saw her through the window, talking to a man. He thought this was her "lover", and shot her through the window with his rifle (or whatever it was that he was carrying at the time). The bullet - thank goodness! - hit Jessie's corset and was diverted by the whalebone. It passed through her breast and exited under her arm. If she hadn't been wearing her corset she would have been shot through the heart. The man she had been talking to was another Seymour son, fiance and later husband to the daughter of the family Jessie was staying with at the time.
The outcome of the trial was that WGJ was jailed in Christchurch, New Zealand, for 8 years. He died in Whangarei in the North Island of New Zealand some years later - I don't think he ever returned to the Chathams. Before this incident he had been one of the most highly respected men on the Chathams, and was in fact a very early settler there. He moved his family there when most of the population were Maori. I think there were only about 100 - 150 Europeans there at the time, amongst a population of hundreds of Maori.
One of my dearest wishes is to trace the early life of William Gordon Jacobs; to find the two women he married before coming to New Zealand; to find his military record - if indeed he did fight in the civil war; and to find the ship he travelled on to New Zealand, and the date.
The other strongly held wish is to connect him to the family I am sure is his, via some form of documentation, and to track the birth place/country and life of his father, William Jacobs.
There is prolific information about the Olmsted family, and I have Hannah's ancestry and family history all the way back to Essex and her ancestor Richard Olmsted in the 1600s, and even further back than that.
Thanks for your attention everyone. William Gordon Jacobs' story is indeed a fascinating one, which spans several countries - as I am sure do millions of other stories.
Marie
