I think my fourth great grandfather may have been a bigamist

Question

Theodore Wiepert-81 was married to Martha Kidman in London and no trace of him after the 1841 UK Census. Then he turns up in the United States married to Esther Johnston with a new family and the same profession he had in London, a FURRIER.

Comments

Wasn't there one of those on BBC WDYTYA?  Was it Bruce Forsyth's ancestor?

Heard about another one.  Lived in the fens, set off to work one morning, never seen again.  Assumed to have fallen into the bog in the fog.  Descendant found him in a census in America with a new wife and family.

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A Great Grandfather of mine had two families just a few hundred miles apart.

Give yours the benefit of the doubt - maybe Martha died before he met Esther.

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Incredible, like you say, disappearing and turning up in America. Theodore was a Furrier and I guess he could say he was going there for business.  I know his sister Sophia was in the Census 1851 with my third great grandmother Louisa as a vistor and she is working for German merchants.  It is funny to think he had at least 12 children with his new wife and that the name did not die out after all. Poor Martha looks like she ended up in the Workhouse.

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Thank you everyone for your great comments and answers.

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Did you find a marriage for Francis Theodore & Esther? It is possible that they didn't actually marry. But it certainly looks as though they were together  in the USA from about 1845 and Martha didn't die until 1879.

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Hi Michelle

No I could not find marriage record, but Esther Johnston is buried in the family plot at Greenwood as Esther Wiepert.  At least twelve more children and a whole other life.  It does make you wonder.  I do feel sorry for Martha, London in Victorian times for a "widowed" or "deserted" woman would have been pretty awful.  Two of the sons that Theodore and Martha had died as infants.  His daughter Louisa my third great grandmother seems to have been looked after by her aunt and grandmother before she married John Greer. Her sister Martha married, but she seems to disappear, maybe she migrated with her husband to another country too.

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I found Martha Kidman Wiepert in the 1871 Census, listed as FURRIER, with her daughter Martha Wiepert Plumer and three grandchildren, so alive and kicking until her death in 1879.

Answer 1

It was legal to re-marry after 7 years abandonment if the absent spouse was not known to be alive or they had not been seen or heard of (and could be assumed deceased). Proof was not required though, but in a small community the locals and clergy would know if a spouse had been missing for more that 7 years.

However many men could desert their spouses in the UK (or be transported) and marry easily in another country where no-one knew them. My ancestor's brother left his wife and children in the workhouse in England, and married within a year bigamously in the USA but returned to his first wife 30 years later!

Comments

Wow! What people do makes me shake my head in disbelief sometimes!

When you say it was legal to re-marry after 7 years abandonment, do you mean in the UK?  And was it during a certain time period?

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It certainly applied in England (I'm not sure about Scotland), and my great grandmother was deserted by her first husband (her cousin twice her age) shortly after the birth of their daughter in 1901 and she re-married to my great grandfather as a widow in 1910. The story passed down was that her first husband fell overboard a ship and drowned - the only evidence presented to the widow supposedly being a newspaper cutting. I spent 25 years on and off trawling through the newspapers and death registers looking for her first husband's death. It was only when the 1939 register came out that I discovered him still alive and well! Then I was able to find him in the 1911 census living in the same county, but quite some distance away.

 

I will see if I can find the original reference to the law regarding desertion/abandonment.

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"See section 57 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861:

Whosoever, being married, shall marry any other person during the life of the former husband or wife, whether the second marriage shall have taken place in England or Ireland or elsewhere, shall be guilty of felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable to be kept in penal servitude for any term not exceeding seven years ... : Provided, that nothing in this section contained shall extend to any second marriage contracted elsewhere than in England and Ireland by any other than a subject of Her Majesty, or to any person marrying a second time whose husband or wife shall have been continually absent from such person for the space of seven years then last past, and shall not have been known by such person to be living within that time, or shall extend to any person who, at the time of such second marriage, shall have been divorced from the bond of the first marriage, or to any person whose former marriage shall have been declared void by the sentence of any court of competent jurisdiction. "

from http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=400889.0

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Wow!  I Had no idea!  Thanks for the information :-)

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You will find some cases where the census states that a couple are married, and women will change their surnames to that of their new "husband" and the death/burial is even recorded in the new surname, but they never actually married because they knew their legal spouse was still alive - eg. my 3x great grandfather whose wife was committed to a lunatic asylum in 1868, and didn't die until 1899. Her husband moved 170 miles away to a busy city but still didn't marry his second "wife" - in that case I think the new "wife" knew about the first wife, but I'm sure many women were totally oblivious to the fact that their partner was already married.

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Thank you for this thread.  I suspect that my ancestry holds a similar story.

Answer 2

(can someone remove the flags on this page, it looks as if they are in error)

I suspect it was very common in a time when divorce was extremely expensive  and even then  involved proving adultery by the  woman or adultery plus another factor such as cruelty by the man. People  simply lived together as if they were married.

This man wasn't married to his second partner. His wife was still alive. He behaved as if he was married to her and  their children were baptised and registered in his name. They appeared on the census as married and  she was buried as his wife. 

As Michelle also suggested, when men were transported no-one knew if they were alive or dead.

Sarah Satchell, was left with young children when her husband was transported in  1841. She was living with  another man in 1851 and had a daughter born in 1843.  Although she hadn't taken her partner's name, she was marked as married to him by the enumerator; maybe a case of local sympathy? . In 1860 she married another man calling herself a widow. Her husband was still alive in Tasmania. She  married in Birmingham, some distance from where she had lived with her husband .I doubt anyone would have known about him.

 

 

Comments

Regarding Theodore Wiepert I had an email from a fourth cousin called David get in touch through Ancestry. He did a DNA test and got matches with Walter Greer my third great uncle and George Donald Wiepert and said all my research was a huge help in working out how he was related to them all . My fourth great grandfather was a bigamist and David got a match with his great grandson George Donald Wiepert from the second wife in the United States which proves all my research to be spot on!! Amazing! Zoe

Answer 3

We did family tree projects when I was in the 8th grade, and I'll never forget one of my classmates bringing in a picture of his great-grandfather and his 2 or 3 wives (I forget) and all of their children. It was a fantastic panorama photo. They were Mormons so not entirely a surprise, but it was an uncommon family portrait that stuck in my memory after all these years.

You will find "marriages" like this too where someone moved from east to west. They left a family behind on the east coast, but started a new one on the frontier. Have definitely run into those stories along the way in my decades of genealogical research. People often assumed they could blend in and create a new life...and for the most part they did. They could have never conceived of DNA tests unraveling the secrets that they kept long after their deaths.

Very cool story. :-)