She was born Elizabeth Lansdown in 1842 in the small rural village of Elberton, Gloucestershire (population 180). She started life as an unschooled milkmaid, but somehow found enough education to be able to write her own signature on her marriage certificate when she married a farm labourer named William Willcox in 1864. William died in 1885, when he was just 43, after a horse kicked him in the head. He lingered five days before succumbing to his injury, leaving Elizabeth alone to care for eight children.
Elizabeth continued to live in the family home at 5 Schubert Cottages in the Bristol suburb of Horfield. We can only speculate how she and her family managed to survive. In 1889 she married George Tremain, a farm labourer from Devon, who was 18 years her junior. The couple may have been nervous or guilty when they wed in the local register office: both lied about their age, George claiming to be two years older than he was and Elizabeth two years younger, and on the marriage certificate Elizabeth spelt her name three different ways, reversing her first and middle names in the process. Did she know then that George had been released from the gaol in Plymouth just a year earlier, after serving a six month sentence for “Servant Larceny”? And did she know that a court order had been issued to force him to pay child support of 1s 6d per week for an illegitimate baby he’d fathered in 1881?
The 1891 census return lists Elizabeth’s sons and daughters as George’s stepchildren, even though one of them, Sarah, was just seven years younger than him. At the time of the 1901 census Sarah was still unmarried and living with Elizabeth and George, even though she was by then 31. George had just turned 40; Elizabeth was 58.
Elizabeth died two months after the 1901 census.
Elizabeth’s daughter Sarah was still living with George when the 1911 census was taken, working at home as a dress maker. Then in 1914, when she was 44, Sarah and George were married.
So here are my questions: Why did George, a young man of 28, marry a 47-year-old mother of eight? How did Elizabeth come to be burned? Why did Sarah never move away from her mother’s home? What kind of relationship did Sarah have with George before her mother died? Does this circumstantial evidence point to a murder? What other clues still exist, and how can we find them?
