Letter: Help me step back in time...
Correspondent • Published 6 Aug 2010 07:30
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I'm hoping that your readers will be able to help me with some family history research.
I've been trying to find out information about a man called Charles William Barlow who married Eva Kate McColm at Reading Register office on October 2, 1918.
The marriage certificate tells me that he was also known by the name Preston, was a 31-year-old bachelor who worked as a brass smelter and lived at 29 Caroline Street, Reading. His father (deceased) was Charles Barlow, a cab proprietor.
A year later they had a daughter called Doris Eva and Charles' profession on the birth certificate is shown as army pensioner.
Soon after, it seems the marriage broke up because Eva had further children, fathered by a man called Frederick Stanley Brind, who she eventually married in 1933.
Incidentally, Frederick was to find out later that his real name was Lovejoy, not Brind!
Eva was born on December 16, 1895, and had been married before (in Reading in 1915), but her first husband, Albert Edward McColm, was killed in World War One.
They had two children, Phyllis and Albert, who both sadly died in 1918 and 1919 respectively.
Nothing is known of Charles' early life or his time in the army, and similarly I haven't been able to find out what happened to him after he left Eva.
His daughter, now 90 years old, would love to know more about him and understand why his name was blotted out on her original birth certificate!
Steven Phillips
39 Cavendish Drive, Waterlooville, Hants, PO7 7PJ
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