George DAWES Line - New Development

The marriage certificate for George DAWES (1821-1869) and Esther COTTINGTON (1831-1863) arrived in the mail yesterday. Until then, I assumed that Esther was George's first wife, however, the certificate shows him as a widower.

Therefore, there might be more children from this family that we don't know about. George had five with Esther and two more with his last wife, Sophia SANTER (1831-1914). See more about George's families in a previous post here.

Now, I thought that solving this would be easy. Look for marriages for George in Uckfield before 1849 when he married Esther. EUREKA there is one! BUT, the marriage registration page for
the December Quarter 1844 has four possible spouses.

The good news is that they all have different given names which is not usually the case. With my luck, they are all Sarah or Harriet. Now, all I had to do was find a death between 1844 and 1849 and I would have her. EXCEPT, Sarah DAWES died in Dec. 1845 and Elizabeth DAWES in Sep. 1847. It's never easy, is it? Given that Elizabeth died closest to the marriage date with Esther of 1849 and that one of the witnesses was William HARVEY, I am going to guess that Elizabeth HARVEY is the best candidate. I have ordered this certificate so we'll see if I am right in a couple of weeks.


There are three DAWES births in Uckfield between the marriage date of 1844 and Elizabeth's assumed death date of 1847 (2 in Mar. 1846 and 1 in Mar. 1847) that could be attributed to George and Elizabeth. Although, there are no children who are unaccounted for in 1851 unless they were living with extended family, maybe the HARVEY's.


Now, to try and find the HARVEY family in the census.

NEWS FLASH: I checked my research spreadsheet that I enter all my B,M,D notes into and found a marriage between George DAWES & Sarah PECKHAM registered in Holy Cross Church, Uckfield 01 Dec 1844. So Elizabeth was the wrong choice!