When you start researching your family tree, you never know what you might find. Sophie Morgan – TV presenter and campaigner – knew very little about her family’s dark past.
“We knew a few things about my mother’s side,” she says, “but nothing about my father’s.”
As I delve into Morgan’s dad’s side of the family, using Ancestry, I’m soon introduced to someone whose life was punctuated with multiple marriages, domestic violence and even a proposed suicide pact.
The life of John Andrew Towle (JAT senior), Morgan’s great-great-grandfather, not only highlights the absence of contraception in the 19th century and the infancy of modern medicine, but also the lack of women’s rights.
JAT senior was born in Salford in 1826 and began his working life as a pawnbroker, like his father before him. JAT senior must have been energetic and ambitious, as he later became an engineer, while remaining a pawnbroker.
He was married three times, the first two of which were to women who lived near him in the lively Broughton Road shopping district. His first marriage, to Catherine Dixon, took place in 1855.
His second marriage, to Morgan’s two-times great-grandmother Mary Ann, took place in Paris in 1867. They went on to have six children together in the seven years they were married. Mary Ann died in 1874, around the same time their final – and her 10th – child, Octavia Ventnor Towle, was born.
But it was his third marriage that was the most tumultuous. JAT senior married Jane Dunster Holliday in June 1875. But they soon went their separate ways. In her divorce petition, dated August 1876, she states that he harmed her physically six weeks after their marriage, when he bruised her arm and tried to “pitch her out of the window”. Soon afterwards, he suggested that they take poison together. The litany of cruelty continued until January 1876. She finally left him after he violently pushed her and “hit her with severe blows, feeling the effects of it for some time”.
At that time, divorce was both unusual and expensive. The grounds for women to divorce their husbands were fewer than those for men and their wives; women had to prove cruelty, whereas for men, adultery on the part of their wife was sufficient.
JAT senior didn’t marry again after the divorce. He lived until 1914, dying aged 88.
Sophie Morgan’s extended family on her mother’s side
Many of his children, including Octavia, didn’t marry. Morgan’s great-grandfather, also called John Andrew Towle, finally married at the age of 49, and had his only child three years later.
Unsurprisingly, Morgan was shocked to find out about her ancestor’s past. “We are uncovering a secret life, a dark side we didn’t know about, which is intriguing,” she says. “Clearly he was a very dodgy character. I wonder how the rest of the family will react? When you find out something you don’t like, how do you feel?”
Meanwhile, Morgan’s mother’s side had their fair share of scandal too – from illegitimacy to fraudulent marriage certificates.
Ancestry reveals that several branches of her mother’s line came from the Scottish Borders between Jedburgh and Berwick-upon-Tweed. Morgan’s great-grandmother, Ann Drummond Ferguson, lived and died in Scotland. Ann was born in August 1886; the word “illegitimate” was marked clearly on her birth certificate. However, when her mother, Agnes, married her father, John Ferguson, six months later, Ann’s birth certificate was amended to show her legitimacy.
However, the illegitimacy wouldn’t have been the only thing raising eyebrows. Agnes was 30 when she gave birth to Ann, while John was just 18 – having been 17 when Ann was conceived. John clearly felt the strain of going against societal norms, as he lied about his age on the marriage certificate, listing himself as 21 when he was still 18, while Agnes, who by then was 31, said she was 30.
They married in the manse (the minister’s house), rather than in church. This implies that they had a small wedding, which was quite normal because the couple were not well off.
Their marriage endured, and they had another six children. However, a new family mystery emerges around Eliza Taylor Drummond – born illegitimate to Agnes two years before Ann, and not John’s child. Eliza was part of their household until 1901, but there is no trace of her after that.
Morgan’s mother’s family came from the Scottish Borders
Finding out about her mother’s roots in Scotland made Morgan keen to visit the part of the country where her ancestors were based. “I love the idea that there’s this woman in the family who married a much younger man,” she says.
The whole experience has made Morgan determined to keep searching for answers about her family’s past.
“I’m so curious to take it further,” she says. “I want to go further back, and I’d like to find living relatives.”
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