The indispensable guide for all family historians tracing the marriages of their English and Welsh ancestors between 1600 and the twentieth century. Based upon years of painstaking primary research, including new studies of thousands of couples, this book explains clearly and concisely why, how, when and where people in past centuries married. Family historians just starting out will find advice on where ‘missing’ marriages are most likely to be found, while those who are already well advanced in tracing their family tree will be able to interpret their discoveries to better understand their ancestors’ motivations. How, for example, should we interpret our ancestors’ decisions to marry in a particular form or place, or at a particular time? Did their choices make them exceptional or normal for their day? Might their marriages have been bigamous, clandestine, or void? Or might they have conscientiously followed the rules set down by Church and State? Professor Rebecca Probert explains the mistakes and confusion found in most genealogical guides, and thoroughly rewrites how family historians should understand their ancestors’ lives in this most personal and universal of areas.

Marriage Law for Genealogists: The Definitive Guide …what everyone tracing their family history needs to know about where, when, who and how their English and Welsh ancestors married

Reference

Probert, Rebecca

Genealogy

Takeaway Publishing

The laws which govern the marriages of the British royal family have led to heartbreak, farce and confusion, and are unfit for the twenty-first century. In an era that values human rights and free choice, there is little certainty over questions as fundamental as the effect of marrying a Roman Catholic, or of marrying without the Queen's consent. Question marks still hang over the legal basis for royal civil marriage. Obscure acts of Parliament have threatened to render members of the royal family illegitimate and prevented others from following their hearts. Drawing on a wide range of sources including once-secret files in the UK's National Archives, The Rights & Wrongs of Royal Marriage recounts episodes from the eighteenth century right down to the present day that would not look out of place in Yes, Minister or The Mikado. Professor Rebecca Probert, the leading authority on the marriage law of England and Wales, is as characteristically clear when explaining the complexities of royal marriage law as she is in her other groundbreaking studies. Her prose is concise and elegant, and full of historical anecdotes that will have royalists and republicans alike laughing aloud and wide-eyed with astonishment.

The Rights and Wrongs of Royal Marriage: How the Law Has Led to Heartbreak, Farce and Confusion, and Why It Must Be Changed

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Tackling Domestic Violence: Proceedings of the 2011 Symposium organised by Warwick University Law School and Soroptimist International of Kenilworth and District

Andrea Kingston Rebecca Probert

"We must religiously observe our engagements with China, but I fear that Hong Kong is a sorry possession and Chusan is a magnificent island admirably placed for our purposes." So wrote the home secretary Sir James Graham to the prime minister Sir Robert Peel, as British diplomats prepared to return the island of Chusan to Chinese rule during the winter of 1845. For years, this now little-known island off the coast of Zhejiang province had been home to thousands of men, women and children of all classes and backgrounds, of all races and religions, from across the British Empire and beyond. Before the Union Jack ever flew over Hong Kong, it had been raised on Chusan. From a wealth of primary archives, Liam D'Arcy-Brown pieces together the forgotten story of how the British wrested Chusan from the Qing dynasty, only to hand it back for the sake of Queen Victoria's honour and Britain's national prestige. At a time when the Chinese Communist Party is inspiring a new brand of patriotism by revisiting the shame inflicted during the Opium Wars, here is a book that puts Britain's incursions into nineteenth-century China in a fascinating and revealing new light.

Chusan: The Opium Wars, and the Forgotten Story of Britain's First Chinese Island

History

D'Arcy-Brown, Liam

Asia

Brought up in the stately grandeur of Burghley House as heir to the earldom of Exeter, Henry Cecil seemed to have made a suitable match to the heiress of Hanbury Hall, but their marriage ended in disaster when Emma eloped with Henry's friend, the local curate. Heartbroken, Henry turned his back on aristocratic life, taking up residence in a remote Shropshire village and marrying a farmer's daughter - without having divorced his first wife.... The story of Henry Cecil's matrimonial entanglements became part of the "sex panic" literature of the 1790s before being reinterpreted by the Victorians as a classic Cinderella tale of rags to riches, and even through into the twentieth century it was still being told and retold. "A Noble Affair" untangles fact from fiction, illustrates just how limited the options once were for those who experienced marital breakdown, and discovers that in some respects Henry did indeed behave nobly.

A Noble Affair: The Remarkable True Story of the Runaway Wife, the Bigamous Earl, and the Farmer's Daughter

Probert, Prof Rebecca

Shaffer, Dr Julie

Bailey, Dr Joanne

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Most of our ancestors were wed only once, and after the death of a spouse did not remarry. Yet every family tree has individuals whose lives did not fit that pattern: a minority of the bereaved chose to take a second or even a third spouse, and with some marriages breaking down and divorce increasingly an option there were always bigamists and divorcees ready to find a new partner. In this follow-up to the bestselling "Marriage Law for Genealogists", Rebecca Probert explains divorce, bigamy, bereavement and remarriage from the 1600s through to the late twentieth century. How long did marriages last? Was the loss of a spouse in middle age as common as we might assume? And for those who did lose a spouse, what factors influenced their choice to remarry or remain single? What signs hint that a marriage might have been bigamous, or that a divorce had been hushed up? How were marital breakdown, bigamy, and cohabitation linked at a time when relationships outside marriage were rare and unacceptable? From the evidential requirements of the divorce courts through to the testimonies of convicted bigamists, and from men who married their late wife’s sister through to couples who went through more than one wedding ceremony together, this book examines law and social custom from every angle. Rebecca Probert is the leading authority on the history of marriage law and practice in England and Wales. She holds a chair in family law at the University of Warwick and regularly appears on TV and radio.

Divorced, Bigamist, Bereaved?: The family historian’s guide to marital breakdown, separation, widowhood, and remarriage: from 1600 to the 1970s

"My ever dear friend. As I may now do so with safety, I will try to write to you the sad particulars of the dreadful wreck of the Kite. May the Almighty in mercy strengthen me for the truly melancholy duty. Amen." So begins a remarkable account of five months spent as a prisoner during the First Opium War (1839-42). Anne Watson was born in 1814 in Wiltshire, but after a sea-voyage turned to tragedy it was as the shipwrecked and widowed 'Mrs Noble' that she became a household name. Held hostage while the Qing dynasty negotiated the withdrawal of British troops from Chinese soil, her treatment scandalized the public, influenced the course of the war, and years later was still the subject of theatrical entertainments and newspaper stories. A devoted wife and mother who sailed tens of thousands of miles across four continents, Anne's resilience forces us to reassess our ideas of what life was like for "ordinary" women during the mid-nineteenth century.

"A White Barbarian Lady": The story of Anne Noble, a Victorian woman imprisoned

Community & Culture

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