On losing your uncle …….. travels with a family secret ….the 1921 census part 2

I had hoped that the newly released 1921 census would help with the family secret.

Window girl, date unknown

Most families have one, and we have quite a few, but this one has remained stubbornly in the shadows.

He was one of my uncles who was never mentioned, and I stumbled across him in my 40s, and despite repeated questions to dad and my other uncles little was forth coming.

Father just met my inquiries with a vague comment and quickly changed the subject while Uncle George vouched safe only of a disastrous marriage, and a preventable death in a Birmingham lodging house.

Over the years I have gone looking for the mysterious uncle, and did find references to his marriage in 1933, and his death twenty years later. There are a few photographs of weddings and individuals which may be connected to him, but alas all are undated and unnamed. 

To which uncle George only added that the death could have been avoided if the landlady of the lodging house had been more attentive when his brother contracted an illness.

And that is it, leading to the family speculation that just possibly the marriage was never dissolved and instead he had left the northeast for the Midlands, and his location was never revealed to anyone except the brothers.

For years I have respected that silence, and even now I wonder at invading that closed story, but the 1921 census proved too much.  

After all this census which will be the last till the 1951 census is published has the promise of revealing so much about post war Britain, and especially about the family.

A wedding, date unknown

A decade earlier he had still been living at home, aged ten and was at school, so ten years on I reasoned there might be clues about him, from his occupation and where he might have worked.

But he was no longer in the family home, and so far, appears nowhere else in 1921.

Which is a blow, leaving me just to call up the marriage and death certificate, and hope that I can then follow up on his wife and his final address.

But I suspect he was a man intent on revealing as little as possible.  At present he has evaded electoral registers, directories and even the 1939 Register.

And that in turn makes me think perhaps he has done enough to stay in the shadows.

We shall see.

Location; the Northeast and the Midlands, 1891-1953

Pictures; unknown friends or relatives of the family, dates unknown, from the collection of Andrew Simpson