Page 136 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

expected from their daughter, Hannah (1825-?), who had James (1844-?), as an illegitimate child; also descendants from their sons, William (1826-1866) , who had George (1848-1925) and Arthur (1858-1939); and Samuel (1831-?), who had Tom (or Thomas) (1858-1934); and George Henry (1862-1940). Although I do not have dates of their deaths, I have assumed that Hannah and Samuel have passed on – William is known to have had an early death at around the age of 40 in 1866. Let’s consider the others in the next generation.
First of all, James who for some reason had not been named in the 1861 census had married Eliza Nettleton, a Bradford girl, in Great Horton Bradford in 1867. James was aged 22. James and Eliza had seven children between 1869 and 1885, but only three – Colonel (1872-1951), Clara (1880-1951) and Arthur (1882-?) – were expected to feature in the 1911 census as Soothills. The others have already been discussed in Chapter 1. As stated earlier, this family seems to be missing from the 1911 census, but there is a further mystery with this family.
The mystery relates to the REMARKABLE BIGAMY CHARGE reported in the Derby Daily Telegraph on 21 February 1906. This is almost certainly the James to whom the charge relates. Interestingly, William Soothill is noted on James’s 1867 marriage certificate and, as stated earlier, I have assumed that this is to avoid the stigma of an empty box on the form and that William is his mother Hannah’s younger brother. James and Eliza had seven children between 1869 and 1885, but the claim in the 1906 bigamy charge is that James, then aged 60, had married a young woman, Hannah Maria Coates, aged 31, while his wife was still alive. In fact, the ‘marriage’ had taken place in Bradford on 18 November 1895 when Hannah Coates was aged 21 years of age with James Soothill claiming that he was a widower with grown-up sons. It was agreed that Hannah should continue to live with her parents as she would not live with his children. He promised to provide a home for her when the sons got married. It seems that a son was born at the end of January (1906) and she had learned that James was a married man a week before the court hearing when two of his sons went to her parents’ house and told her brother.
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