The Brookes/Walker Mystery

After having four children with Mary Ann Walker, Charles married Mary Ann Brookes in Southampton on June 28th 1901.

Mary Ann said her father was Harry George Brookes, deceased. They reported Charles a widower, Mary Ann a spinster, and their residence as Lorna Doon, Ash Tree Road, Portswood.

Lorna Doon was the home of Charles’s cousin Thomas Kendall (the brother of Janet Kendall, with whom it appears Charles had three children) and his wife Julia (née Royall, formerly Brookes, formerly Walker) from Birmingham. (In the 1901 census, Mary Ann had said she was from Birmingham.)

On nearby Oak Tree Road, Portswood, Henry Alfred Kendall, a widower and the son of another of Charles’s cousins was living with his children and Roseanna Brookes, also from Birmingham.

Julia Royall married James Brookes in Birmingham in 1872. They had two daughters: Mary Ann in 1873 and Roseanna in 1875. James Brookes died several months before Roseanna was born, and in early 1876, Julia remarried. Her new husband, Harry George Walker adopted the girls and moved the family first to Bristol by 1881, then to Holdenhurst, Hampshire by 1891.

Harry George Walker died in early 1901 in Blandford, Dorset, and Charles and Mary Ann married shortly thereafter. Why they waited seven years, why she reverted to her birth name, and why she combined the names of her father and stepfather all remain mysteries.

Despite the fact that her second husband was still alive, Julia had apparently married Thomas Kendall in Southampton in 1897, calling herself Julia Brookes. After the death of Harry George Walker, Thomas and Julia, this time calling herself Julia Walker, married again in 1902.

Henry Kendall and Roseanna Brookes married in 1905.