ARC TBC - Lillie Hayes - my mysterious great grandmother
Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2011 2:12 pm
I started researching my ancestors about 20 years ago and got some way down the road, only to hit a number of brick walls, the most irritating of which was my great grandmother - Lillie Hayes. She seems to have had an aversion to any kind of officialdom and first seems to have troubled the registrar shortly after her death in 1918!
So what I do know;
She claimed to be an actress, although research at the Theatre Museum and through an archive in South London whose name I have forgotten, revealed nothing concrete;
From census records, she seems to have been born in 1865/6 in Marylebone, now the West End of London. I have checked both national records and the local records held at Marylebone Town Hall but no evidence of a Lille Hayes being born there (or anywhere else for that matter) has appeared. Of course Lillie may just have been a name she adopted in later life and her given name was something completely different, but short of investigating every female with the surname Hayes born in Marylebone over a two year period (and there were a lot) I don't know how to proceed. Does anybody have any ideas?
She appears in the 1881 census working as a waitress in her brother in law's restaurant in Long Lane, Covent Garden. Not an actress, but smack in the middle of theatre-land.
In the mid-1890s, she becomes the common law wife of Joseph Silvester (my great grandfather) and the first of several children is born in 1895, all bearing the surname Silvester. He also has an official wife but all record of her and her family ends after the 1891 census (there is no record of Lillie or Joseph in 1891).
The only other records we have of her were as a witness to her sister's marriage in 1878 and after 1881 she disappears not to surface again until 1895.
You may say that I actually know quite a bit about her, but there is a huge gap between the ages of 18 and 30 which is completely blank and one would have expected this to be the most heavily recorded period of a person's life.
Does anybody have any ideas how I can fill this void, not excluding any line of research - criminality, lunacy it's all the same to me!
Any advice would be truly gratefully received as this has become something of an obsession...!
Incidentally, this is a photograph of the lady concerned, taken about 1880 when said to be in a play called 'The Fish Maid of Orleans'. No record of that seems to exist either...
So what I do know;
She claimed to be an actress, although research at the Theatre Museum and through an archive in South London whose name I have forgotten, revealed nothing concrete;
From census records, she seems to have been born in 1865/6 in Marylebone, now the West End of London. I have checked both national records and the local records held at Marylebone Town Hall but no evidence of a Lille Hayes being born there (or anywhere else for that matter) has appeared. Of course Lillie may just have been a name she adopted in later life and her given name was something completely different, but short of investigating every female with the surname Hayes born in Marylebone over a two year period (and there were a lot) I don't know how to proceed. Does anybody have any ideas?
She appears in the 1881 census working as a waitress in her brother in law's restaurant in Long Lane, Covent Garden. Not an actress, but smack in the middle of theatre-land.
In the mid-1890s, she becomes the common law wife of Joseph Silvester (my great grandfather) and the first of several children is born in 1895, all bearing the surname Silvester. He also has an official wife but all record of her and her family ends after the 1891 census (there is no record of Lillie or Joseph in 1891).
The only other records we have of her were as a witness to her sister's marriage in 1878 and after 1881 she disappears not to surface again until 1895.
You may say that I actually know quite a bit about her, but there is a huge gap between the ages of 18 and 30 which is completely blank and one would have expected this to be the most heavily recorded period of a person's life.
Does anybody have any ideas how I can fill this void, not excluding any line of research - criminality, lunacy it's all the same to me!
Any advice would be truly gratefully received as this has become something of an obsession...!
Incidentally, this is a photograph of the lady concerned, taken about 1880 when said to be in a play called 'The Fish Maid of Orleans'. No record of that seems to exist either...