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We started looking for more about Anne using the information we had, without success. William Williams, Anne’s son, was a common name and there were a few whose mother’s name was Anne but none of them seemed to be likely to be the one we were looking for.
There wasn't any Gilbert Bolden marrying Anne Fellows or Anne Williams. There was a Gilbert Bolden marrying an Anne Wilmshurst but it was about 10 years after Gilbert and Anne started their family. We checked to see if this could be explained by Anne's first husband being alive and their delaying the marriage until he died but none of the Wilmshursts who died at that time could have been Anne's husband.
Eventually I ran out of ideas of where to look and decided to get the marriage certificate for this later Gilbert Bolden marriage and, Hey Presto!, Anne was described as “formerly Fellows”. So all their children were born out of wedlock! Not only that, they both put the same current address on the marriage certificate, not trying to cover up the fact that they were already living together. (Later it was obvious that this was the right marriage because it seems that there was only one person with the name Gilbert Bolden in Britain at that time. I don’t know how often this happens, but it is very useful for doing research, when it does. As far as I can tell, there were only two Gilbert Boldens in Britain in the 1800s and the other one was his son, Gilbert John Bolden).
From this the usual birth, marriage and census returns quickly gave us more information, puzzles and lies. Anne's first marriage was to William Wilmshurst in Shoreditch and their son, William, was born there a year later. The wedding was 10 days before Anne’s 18th birthday but this was legal, provided the parents didn’t block the reading of the Banns. However, Anne always lied about her age and place of birth in later census returns as her christening and the 1851 census show her as being born in Whitechapel, not Hertfordshire, so perhaps she lied about her age for the wedding. Her father is given as a Silk Weaver and Cabinet Maker in some documents and a Nonconformist Minister in others but this could be correct as the Minister’s role may not have been full time.
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