Ernest Alfred Clarke was born in July 1866 in Wallingford, in the county of Berkshire, England. His father, Robert George Clarke, Esq., age 41, was a Victorian gentleman with no profession, although he came from a long line of surgeons. His mother, Catherine Gow, age 42, was the daughter of a wealthy London brewer, George Gow, general manager of Truman's Brewery in the East End of London.
When Ernest was 5 years old, the family left Wallingford for the riverside town of Staines-upon-Thames, on the outskirts of London, where his father would increasingly struggle to maintain an upper middle class lifestyle for his family on interest income that yielded less and less value as the decades passed. Ernest would have been raised as a little gentleman, and family lore has it that he never had a job in his life before he emigrated from England to the United States in 1889 at the age of 23. He may have first arrived in Canada to visit cousins, but eventually settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a very beautiful and posh neighborhood, and began to pursue a living as a "commercial traveler" or traveling salesman. I believe he went back to England at least once - in 1893, on the occasion of his father's death in London.
In October 1895, Ernest went on a fateful sales trip to North Carolina. In Randleman, a mill town, he boarded at the Hotel Ingold, a small residence and boarding hotel owned and operated by Fernando "Frank" Ingold and his wife Jennie. Within two months, Ernest married Frank Ingold's daughter Fredonia ("Donia"), a vivacious young Southern belle given to appearing in the local society columns whenever she attended a dance or a "lemon luncheon." The paper proclaimed the marriage "one of the most brilliant matrimonial alliances ever celebrated in Randleman." Ernest whisked Fredonia back to Park Slope, where she gave birth to their first child, Robert Ernest in 1897.
But by 1900, the family were back in Randleman, where they lived with Fredonia's father, mother and sisters. Ernest and Fredonia had four children in 11 years, moving quite frequently across the South - Salisbury, Savannah, and finally Charlotte. Ernest's career as a salesman seems to have been a spotted one. He sold flour. He sold insurance. He sold correspondence courses. Family lore has it that, while in Chicago, Ernest lost an arm in a terrible accident when he fell onto the tracks in the path of an oncoming elevated train. It's said that for the rest of his life, when he wasn't wearing his prosthetic limb, he'd keep it hanging from the coat rack by the front door. His three sons never got beyond junior high school - they were plucked from their education in order to help support the family.
Ernest had a short life, and I suspect it wasn't the life he envisoned when he left his family in Victorian England to make his fortune in the States. He lost an arm in the process, and I suspect his marriage wasn't a very happy one -- that his vivacious young Southern bride became increasingly bitter and demanding as the years went on and Ernest's income failed to keep the family in the lifestyle to which he and Fredonia aspired. He was probably deeply humiliated at having to pull his sons from school to go to work. I suspect he struggled with drink. By the time of his death, he was living apart from his wife and children, at the Charlotte YMCA.
He died of heart disease on April 6, 1921 at the age of 54, and was buried in Oaklawn Cemetery in Charlotte, North Carolina, a long, long way from Wallingford.
Earnest was born in 1866.
Ancestry.com. North Carolina, Deaths, 1906-1930 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
Original data: North Carolina, Deaths, 1906-1930. Salt Lake City, Utah: FamilySearch, 2013.
Transcript
Name: Ernest Alfred Clarke residence date: 1881 residence place: Staines, Middlesex, England birth date: July 1866 birth place: Wallingford, Berkshire, England
Detail
Source Citation: Class: RG11; Piece: 1329; Folio: 85; Page: 20; GSU roll: 1341323
Web Address
http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?db=uki1881&h=15617889&ti=0&indiv=try&gss=pt
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Source Information
Title
1881 England Census
Author
Ancestry.com and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Publisher
Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004. 1881 British Isles Census Index provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints © Copyright 1999 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved. All use is subject to the l
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