I could do with some help solving a mystery, as my head is spinning from thinking about this so I’d really welcome other perspectives. This is a long one, with some disturbing possibilities (TW for possible sexual assault). Our mystery starts with Charles Eden, a packer from Liverpool...
Based on the certainty of the place and date of his son George’s birth in Liverpool in 1878 I found George's mother’s maiden name was Bell. George’s marriage certificate gives his father’s name and profession as Charles Eden, a packer. Further research leads to marriage records for Charles Eden and Mary Ann Bell in Liverpool in 1867. Charles’ father is named as William Eden, a carver. So far so good.
At this point Ancestry gives me a hint that Charles’ mother might be a Charlotte Sandle, and sure enough there’s a marriage record for William Eden, a carver and gilder, to Charlotte Sandle, in 1841. William’s father is named as Christopher Eden, a carver.
This is where things start getting murky.
In the 1841 census Christopher Eden, a carver and gilder, is living with his wife Maria and several children, including William, aged 15 and born in Liverpool, implying that his birth was in 1826, which is backed up by baptism records from November 1826.
Ancestry suggests a hint for the 1851 census for Charlotte and Charles, with Charlotte listed as a 30-year-old widow, and Charles aged 4, implying a birth date of 1847. Also on the census are several other children, including 16-year-old Thomas. If this is to be believed it would suggest that Charlotte was around 14 when she gave birth to him, and William around 9, which would be both physically improbable and quite disturbing.
Assuming that this Charlotte is the right one though I looked for William’s death certificate, and sure enough there’s one for William Eden, a 24-year-old carver and gilder, in 1847, and whose father Christopher had been present at his death. That would move his year of birth to 1823, which makes things a bit less icky as that would imply William was around 12 at the time of Thomas's birth.
Wanting some more answers I looked up Thomas Eden and found a marriage record from 1875 for a 30-year-old Thomas Christopher Eden, whose deceased father was William Eden, a carver and gilder, putting Thomas’s year of birth at 1845, which would make things considerably less icky. One could be forgiven for assuming at this point that the census taker or enumerator in 1851 made a mistake and recorded Thomas’s age as 16 not 6.
Things get very murky though when we look at the 1851 census, where we find a 6yo Thomas Christopher Eden living with his father, a 43yo William Eden in Liverpool, a carver and gilder born in Wigan (so year of birth in c.1818) who is married to Eliza (née McGregor). Looking at the 1844 marriage certificate for William and Eliza reveals a deceased father for William: Thomas, a cooper. This family was also living together in 1861. Apart from those two census entries there is no record I can find of a William Eden having been born in or around Wigan around 1818.
If you’re still with me I have a couple of thoughts of what might be going on, but neither is entirely satisfactory.
The first is that William might have been a bigamist and lying to Eliza about his age and background. Both Williams got married within a few years of each other, and have families with several children of about the same age. But if that were to be the case then what about the death certificate for William son of Christopher in 1847? I'd considered a faked death, but this hypothesis falls down because a) the death was certified, and b) William would still have been trading as a carver and gilder in Liverpool, which if he’d faked your own death would have been a bit brazen.
Or maybe there really were two William Edens working as carvers and gilders in Liverpool at the same time, one born in Wigan in 1818 and the other in Liverpool five (or eight) years later. If so that would be an amazing coincidence, but that means we really would are left with the situation where a 12yo (or 9yo!) William and 14yo Charlotte get pregnant in 1834/5, before they were married in 1841, although here there is also another disturbing possibility that this William isn't Charlotte's son Thomas's real father, and that Charlotte had been raped when she was 14.
Or maybe there’s another explanation. I’m open to suggestions.
