Trying to find
Sarah Louisa Wyle proved rather more difficult than anticipated. A death
certificate would have been the easiest one to find first as it was known when
she was last alive. Unfortunately we didn't have any idea how old she would have
been so really stretched the point and made her between 12 and 60 years old when
she gave birth! Gordon gave in when she would have been about 112 when she died!
The only answer to the puzzle was that she must have married. Again all indexes
were searched for a marriage after 1910. I ordered a copy of her death
certificate under the married name of Pethick hoping it might be the right one.
Another problem arose from this. Unlike the Scottish certificates, there were no
parents names and this one was Sarah Louise Wyle. I took a chance and
ordered the marriage and the birth certificates we had found. The marriage
certificate arrived first. It gave her father as Charles Wyle. This
looked as if it were going to be correct after all as Jack had Charles as a
middle name. Then the birth certificate arrived. Sarah's mother had been a Blake
and her name was Louisa.
These certificates now put
Sarah Wyle in the Salisbury area, where Jack was brought up. She died at
Netheravon which was only a very few miles from Newton Toney, where Jack was a
Signalman with the railway. I wondered if she knew where Jack was and it now
seems as if this was indeed true.
A family member had this photograph of Sarah.
It has been photographed from a photograph which, in turn, had been enlarged
from another photograph, hence the poor quality. When Gordon first saw it he
thought it was his father. The original photograph bares a striking resemblance
to him.
On the 1901 Census, Sarah
is working as a housemaid (domestic) at The Close, Salisbury. She was working
for a sixty nine year old widow, Maria Dowland. Sarah's older sister, Mary is
also working at the same place as a Cook.
I found a George
Wyle on the 1901 census I realised that this has to be the son of Jesse Wyle and
Mary Rolfe from Ham, Buttermere, Wiltshire, which makes him the brother to
Charles, Sarah's father. Therefore, this
George is Sarah's uncle and ties in the Amesbury Wyle's
with the Brentford Wyle's. This has also given me the answer to the question of
whom Sarah Keziah Wyle was staying with when she had Jack. She must have been
with her aunt and uncle or cousins. Jack was born, just off Uxbridge Road,
Hanwell and George's family were only 1.4 miles away at Danes Road in 1901.
George's
sister Sarah, and Sarah Keziah's aunt, must have married Thomas Shesby Cleaver.
(see
Jesse Wyle
Page)
I have managed to
find a couple of Cleavers
on the 1901 census - AT HANWELL. Whether this was her aunt still has
to be investigated but it is getting nearer to who she was with when Jack was
born.
Another link to
Brentford comes from Sarah's sister Edith. She married a Leonard Wiseman at Mile
End and they had a child born in Brentford called May.
It is now known
that Sarah married and had another two children. It was, in fact, her daughter
who told me of a woman she had suspected as being her mother's daughter. She
said that when she was between 8-11 a well dressed woman had visited and gave
her a watch and her mother a brooch. A watch would be a very expensive gift for
a young child at the time. I promised her that I would find out for her, after
all she had wondered about this all her life. She even said it was better than
the Catherine Cookson books she read.
I did indeed have
a note of a Queenie Wyle in my data base. Of course without having the actual
certificate I had no way of knowing who she was or whom she belonged to. So I
sent for the certificate and could send Aunt Betty the information she had
always been curious about.
I am now in touch
with Queenie's daughter.
Another family
member has provided information which proved that what I had suspected was true,
Jack had known about his real family all along, or at least some of them.
