ALBERT WILLIAM MARELLI, KNOWN TO MOST AS BERT, is of Italian extraction, a fact that I found very interesting and romantic so you would assume, naturally, that I delved into Bert’s life story and those of his ancestors often. Wrong! Now Bert has gone taking with him a million unanswered questions and to add to my frustration, my husband, Brian, is just as guilty of the same negligence towards his family history as I am.

Bert did not talk very much about his past, except for the story about his grandfather Martino who walked from Italy and started his life in England selling ice off the back of wagons. Why did Bert talk so little about his background I now ask myself? Was it because he was reluctant to divulge very much information or because we failed to listen or show deeper interest by asking questions?

Whatever Bert’s reasons I was horrified that Brian knew so little, while I could be forgiven as I was only the daughter-in-law. I now admit, somewhat reluctantly, that it took me another two years to realise I knew even less about my own family history than Brian knew about his.

June 1998 – Bert’s Papers

Brian inherited lots of paperwork and family photographs from Bert and among the piles were some very interesting documents:

We were completely fascinated by the above but also puzzled because four of the children listed on the naturalisation certificate were born prior to Martino’s marriage to Amy Plummer. There had never been any discussion within the family of Martino having been married twice. Surely someone would have known this? For a few days we assumed that either Amy had been married before and that her children took the name Marelli when she married Martino or that maybe Amy and Martino had lived together before marriage for some reason.

We even discussed these possibilities with Brian’s only aunt and uncle (Vic and Bet) but they could not help. As far as the family was concerned Martino only married once and they had heard nothing to the contrary. We came to the conclusion that we had to investigate this further and decided to find a birth certificate for the oldest named child of Martino called Helen, as named on the naturalisation certificate, in the hope that this certificate would furnish us with a clue.

With all of the above we noted that Martino, Albert and Bert, three generations of Marelli men, lived into their 80s and we could now go back four generations on a couple of branches of Brian’s family tree (see figure 1.4).

Brian’s Ancestors – July 1998

The first important piece of information we found out is that Somerset House no longer held births, marriages and deaths! When did this happen? We discovered the existence of the Family Record Centre (FRC), London and set out to find Helen, one of the mysterious older children of Martino Marelli, Brian’s great grandfather, prior to his marriage to Amy Plummer in 1891. We made the decision to unravel this mystery in memory of Bert, because at that time we had no real interest in family history ourselves. To be honest we did not have a clue about family history or how to go about it but felt it would be interesting to solve this riddle.

We did not arrive at the FRC until about 11.30 a.m. on a Saturday morning mainly because we had to catch a train into London and two tubes followed by a 20-minute walk. We had our bags searched by security and were directed downstairs where there are facilities, lockers, snack machines, phones and a large seating area. Back upstairs through reception on the right we found the area housing all the registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths, plus an enquiry desk.

Within this area are masses of shelves housing the large index volumes all stacked in rows with large sloping desks placed between the rows to rest the books on while researching. The place was heaving with people that day and everyone seemed to know what they were doing except for us, but the atmosphere was exhilarating. After queuing at the information desk we were directed to Births and looked at the years surrounding 1876 to 1878 when Helen, if the age is correct on the naturalisation certificate, is supposed to have been born.

We found nothing registered under the name Helen Marelli. To our dismay we also discovered our first mistake, we had only looked at one volume for each year instead of four. What we failed to take in at this point is that there are four books for every year split into quarters.

Convinced we would now find Helen we started again but failed to find her although we did find a birth for a Rosa Marelli, born in 1877 in Islington, and Martin Marelli born in 1878 in Lambeth, a thrilling experience. We went for a coffee and thought about things. Is Helen the illegitimate daughter of Amy? Is she adopted? Is she perhaps Martino’s daughter from a previous relationship? Confusion fogged our minds so we decided to look for some of the other children. Sadly in our eagerness to get to the FRC we had not taken with us one vital piece of information, the naturalisation document listing the names and ages of Martino’s children, but then we only ever intended to look for Helen!

Completely unequipped we searched through births again from 1876 and located two more in the London area and one in Manchester. Perhaps the birth in Manchester is a relative of Martino’s? The children we found were Ada in 1880 and Matilda in 1882, both from Lambeth. The Macclesfield birth was for a John Fred. We had no idea if any of these finds were related to Martino but suddenly we had to find out. It occurred to us that even though we could not find Helen Marelli we had found other children so this meant that Martino had been in a relationship previously!

Energised we rushed back to customer services with our precious discoveries to ask how we order the certificates only to be told we had not taken down enough information and needed to take a pink form and fill in all the details from the registers.

Eventually, after revisiting the same volumes for the third time, we collected all the necessary information, queued and ordered all four certificates.

Our next visit was to the Marriage indexes. Well we couldn’t leave now, not without looking for Martino’s first wife, could we, if indeed he had married before his marriage to Amy? As his eldest child, Helen, was 20 in 1897 we began our search four years prior to her probable birth date from the year 1873 with every intention to continue until 1897, the extra years were to allow room for error.

With a scrap of paper and pencil ready to note each year and quarter methodically we grabbed a volume each, fighting for a space in this very popular area for family historians. I wanted everyone to disappear and leave us alone to carry out our most important research; no one else could be doing anything as vital as we were!

I was pleased that although I am reasonably petite I am quite strong and able to squeeze into little gaps, duck under arms and swing heavy index volumes onto desks with agility. I was getting quite hot and bothered thinking it was going to get rough but managed to keep my irritation in check when Brian grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me round to face him. Wordlessly he pointed to the name of his great grandfather Martino Marelli in the first quarter of 1875 and for one rare moment I too was speechless. It was staggering, our eyes filled with tears; it was as if we had just stepped back in time and said, ‘Hello, Martino’.

What would Martino have made of us doing this 123 years after his marriage and 48 years after his death, we wondered in amazement? We ordered this certificate but as we were mentally drained, hungry and emotional we decided to head home and digest what we had found along with some sandwiches.