I decided to build a website during the last lockdown. It will be hosted on the Guild of One Name Studies website and is still under construction, so not yet live. Fortunately I don't have to know any coding etc. as the Guild does all that, but I have had to do a lot of tidying of my data.
All the family trees have been loaded into one huge tree, so at the very least it will be an index to all the Gidleys in one place. I have already found this useful myself. Looking at the trees as a whole enabled me to link at least 3 together. And I hasten to add, only deceased Gidleys will be found on the website. Anyone still living has, I hope, been made private, and that has taken a lot of time. So the individual trees of each branch on my own PC at home will still hold more data.
As time goes on I hope to add more feature articles to the website, but I have to get to grips with that part of the program first!
I have also created a Guethle tree for those members of the Guethle family who anglicised their name to Gidley. I know many people know far more about those families than I do, but I did want to include them in the main tree on the website. It was interesting that the Guethle/Gidleys in the USA are not closely related (not since the 18th century) to the Guethle/Gidleys in Australia, although they did both originate in Baden-Württemberg in Germany.
Meanwhile, here are two victims of bigamy and, to redress the balance, a bigamist herself. These events took place many years ago and we can never know the exact circumstances. Bigamy was always called "the poor man's divorce" when divorce for the ordinary couple was almost out of the question. I believe that after seven years' desertion by a spouse many people considered they were free to marry again. There has been a tiny number of more recent bigamists, but I have no intention of recording them.
In Australia in July 1896 a lady named Jane Galloway brought a charge of bigamy against John Purvis, a slater. She claimed he married her, after declaring he was a bachelor, on 29 April 1895 in Redfern, New South Wales. All the time he already had a wife in England, who was still alive. It was ruled that there was insufficient evidence of the previous marriage, but a week later Jane brought a lesser charge of wife desertion against John Purvis and he had to pay 5s a week for the next 12 months with 5s 10d costs. The previous wife, and victim of the bigamy, was born Alice Gidley in Grimsby in 1860, the daughter of successful trawler owner John Gidley and his wife Elizabeth Allen. Alice married John Purvis in 1881 in Grimsby. They emigrated to Australia the following year, but by 1891 Alice had returned to England with her three children, all born in Australia, and they were living in Grimsby with her parents. In 1901 Alice was a cook with a family in the West Riding of Yorkshire, calling herself a widow. At least one of her children remained with their grandparents in England.
Violet Victoria Gidley, daughter of Robert Andrews and Sarah Kate Gidley, was the victim of a bigamist during the First World War. A soldier, Amos Carpenter, of the A.S.C., stationed nearby, married her in Norwood, Middlesex, in 1916. However, a few months later his first wife brought a charge of bigamy against him, producing evidence of their marriage in 1910. Amos claimed he had been told his wife was dead and that he was surprised to find her alive. He received a light sentence in 1917: imprisonment for two days. Violet later made another marriage and emigrated to Canada.
The bigamist herself was Henrietta Hester Daniell who was born in 1843 and married Richard Gidley of Throwleigh, Devon, in Exeter in 1863. Richard was at first a grocer and druggist, then moved into assisting his father, but at his marriage was described as a writer. It's not clear if he suffered from ill health, but he evidently didn't follow one successful occupation throughout his life. In 1871 he and Hetty were living with his father Gustavus, an innkeeper and cooper, at the inn in Wonson, near Throwleigh with two of their children. Richard had no occupation. He and Hetty stayed together till at least 1873 when their youngest child, a daughter who died at the age of 2 years, was born. The same year (1875) his father died, and perhaps those two events were the trigger for the split. By 1881 Hetty had moved to the other side of England with two of the children, claiming to be a widow. She was employed as a schoolmistress in Bedfordshire. In 1891 she was living in Walthamstow in East London, and the following year married again. Her marriage certificate shows she considered herself a widow. She used the name Gidleigh in 1881, 1891 and at her second marriage - possibly to avoid detection.
But Richard was still alive, though moving around his native county of Devon. In 1881 he was an agent, supposedly unmarried, lodging in a pub in Broadhembury. By 1891 he had moved to Honiton where his brother Gustavus was based, and made his living as a toll keeper, a "single" man, but that was another short-lived occupation. By 1901 he was again unemployed and living, again "unmarried", with his younger brother Gustavus. He died in 1905 aged 72.
I have included a photo (from Geograph, licensed for re-use under a Creative Commons licence) of the Northmore Arms in Wonson, Throwleigh, which I suspect must be the pub where Richard began life, where his father Gustavus was an innkeeper and cooper, and where he and his family were living in 1871. It was known as the New Inn when they lived there.
I haven't found any direct evidence that it was the same building, though Wonson seems too small to support more than one inn.
More news on the website will follow when it's all tidied up, fit to be seen and gone live.
