14.2 4xgreat grandmother Eleanor Wilson (1792?-1862): early marriage, fleeting records and another brick wall

My 4xgreat grandmother Eleanor Wilson was a spinster when she married widower Jeremiah Windebank in Basildon, Berkshire on 15 August 1810. The Bishops Transcript of their marriage gives no other information, and no other online records have been found for the marriage. In the 1851 census, her age is given as 57 (born 1794), and her birthplace as Oxford, Oxon. 

Ten years later, she has been widowed after 46 years of marriage, and is living at The Red Lion Inn, Basildon, with her son William Windebank, who has taken over as Publican following his father’s death in 1856. Again, her birthplace is shown as Oxford, Oxon, and her age – 68 – is fairly consistent with the previous census. In the 1841 census, her age has been rounded down from a likely 47-48 to 45, in accordance with the instructions to enumerators. This would mean that she was 16-17 years old when she married the 30 year old widower, Jeremiah Windebank.

Her death was registered on 19 September 1862 by an Elizabeth Brooker, ‘Present at the death’ in Basildon. Her death certificate shows that she died two days earlier, on 17 September, of ‘Diseased Uterus and Bowels’, a condition which the doctor certifies that she had suffered for six years. Her name is recorded as Ellen rather than Eleanor, her age is given as 70 (born 1792) and she is described as ‘The Widow of Jeremiah Windebank, formerly Innkeeper’. Elizabeth Brooker may have been a relative of her daughter-in-law, also Elizabeth Brooker, who married Benjamin Windebank in 1855.

Oxford is some 27 miles from Basildon. A search for the baptism of an Ellen or Eleanor Wilson in Oxford/shire around 1792-1794 on the major genealogy websites finds no likely baptism for her; other family trees on Ancestry suggest that her father was Peter Wilson (b1770) and her mother Elizabeth Knight, but no sources are given to support this. So for now her parentage remains a brick wall. Apart from her marriage and appearance in three censuses, she makes little mark in the official records, apart from being named as mother on the baptisms of her thirteen children.

For the sources mentioned in bold, see blogpost: MyRoots: Lesly's family history: Sources and resources: A quick view