Fellow Rootschatters - usually I am the helper but I have a thorny one that somebody may just have the key to. This is the second wife of my wife's paternal grandfather and I am helping her half-cousin research his side of the family. What we have:
The Archives in Cape Town have the following information:
Death of Alice Riley - maiden name Alice Frances Butler - died 20 Mar 1943 - age 73 years & 7 months - born October 1869, England. Husband's name Charles Riley [died 1942]. You will already have spotted a error in calculation in her exact age at date of death!
A search on Ancestry and then on 1837online revealed only one Alice Frances Butler Dec. 1865 Bethnal Green 1c p. 325 - there are others born near the date but birth records on 1837online always show a second Christian name if given. The 1865 does not worry me as she seems to have married at asomething about age 30 and a maiden lady of those days might easily knock off a few years to help with finding a husband and then stick with that story.
OK so far? - there is a family legend that she was the daughter of a Doctor of "Cheltenham" - these people live in South Africa so any vaguely similar name might do.
I find no Alice that fits in 1871 or 1881 and no Dr. Butler with a daughter Alice in 1881.
She married Charles Riley about 1894 or 1895 - nobody knows if this was in England or South Africa.
She had a son who was sent to a private boarding school in England - Tollington in the Muswell Hill area. So, I have tried to find her round there in '81 and '91 on the basis that she would hardly have picked a school with which she had no familiarity. There were some pretty good boarding schools in South Africa, even back then so it was not a normal thing to do. I formed the idea that her parents may have lived in that area - perhaps he was not a boarder but a day scholar living at their home.
I doubt whether anybody will want to spend a week on this as I have but perhaps someone may have this Dr. Butler or one of his children in their own blood line.
Lastly - her third son - not the one who went to Tollington, was christened Charles Henry de Beauvoir Riley. The de Beauvoir bit intrigues me. The others were Ernest, Cecil Myer, Violet Isobel so no fancypants middle names there. Does that offer any clue? There was a de Beauvoir St. in East London, I think Hackney.There was a de Beauvoir in the 1891 census but none before or after that I have found.
