Charles and Frank Taylor: A mystery solved

After a bit of research and getting in touch with two cousins on the Taylor/Speller/Chase side of the family, who along with my grandmother have shared their memories and pieced bits of information together in this family jigsaw, I’ve realised that Charles Taylor and Frank Taylor who I had believed until recently to be two separate children of Beatrice and Laurence Taylor, are in fact the same person.

There was always a mystery when I started doing the family tree a few years ago about this unknown son of Beatrice and Laurence named Charles who appears on the census in 1911. But just because there were no memories of him, it didn’t prove he didn’t exist, so I added him to the tree as he was listed on the census.

On the other hand, my grandmother did remember having fond memories of visiting her Uncle Frank Taylor who married ‘Aunt Lil’ and ran a television/radio shop in Manor Park. So I added him to the tree also and tried figuring out why he wasn’t there with Beatrice during the 1911 census, as she was at this point living with another man named Alfred H. Walker in Walthamstow. At the time, I thought this meant Frank had to have been born before 1910 because she was no longer with Laurence after 1911. But then there was the discovery a couple of years after starting my research into the Taylors, that there was in fact another Taylor child born to Beatrice and Laurence in 1913 named Laurence James Taylor. This meant that the couple got back together some time after the 1911 census was taken and this made me then think that Frank Taylor must have also been born when they got back together between 1911/1912 and 1915 when Laurence died.

As my grandmother had told me about Uncle Frank Taylor being married to Lil, I thought that with this piece of information it would be relatively easy to find a record for a Lilian/Lily and Frank Taylor marriage. I remember searching for a possible marriage for Frank Taylor with no luck a couple of times with no luck. If it did exist somewhere, the marriage record would have been the only document for Frank Taylor as I was unable to find any matching record for him, including that of his birth.

Then thanks to the efforts of my cousin Gillian Worwood, she discovered a marriage record between a Charles Frank Taylor and Lily Porter in the district of Stepney in 1928. It took a while for me to realise, but it started to occur to me that Frank was actually Charles! It seems that like many other (mainly male) members of the Taylor/Speller/Chase family, Charles seemed to go by a different name (possibly his middle name, or possibly a nickname that stuck) as his marriage record showed.

It definitely explained why there was a mystery of nobody having any memories of another child named Charles Taylor. Now that all the pieces are coming together, I reckon that Laurence James Taylor was very likely the only child born to Laurence after Beatrice’s relationship with Alfred H. Walker had ended.

This confirms the relation of Uncle Frank and Aunt Lil that my grandmother had told me about and also takes the number of children that Beatrice and Laurence Taylor had together down from five to four. The best part of having merged the rather empty profiles of Charles and Frank together, is that I am well on the way to completing the missing birth dates and events for all the children of Beatrice who at the beginning of my research were some of the most difficult of my ancestors to track down!

With thanks to Mary Beatrix Wood and Gillian Worwood.