I DID say my mother's early life was a bit complicated!!
She was indeed Elsie Tovey - later calling herself Freda Elsie Tovey (1899-1995). Her story could perhaps be the subject of a further thread, some time, because there were there as well one or two unexplained wrinkles, but probably not here, at this moment. So, just briefly:
For complicated reasons she was brought up not by her own mother but by Elizabeth (Tovey) Snook, her paternal grandmother. Elizabeth had had a relationship with a man but didn't quite get around to solemnising it. The outcome was George Tovey, my grandfather, who retained his mother's family name. His marriage resulted in four children, two of whom didn't survive beyond the age of two or three (one because of illness, the other being run over by a cart in the street - what tragedies Victorian inner-city parents had to endure!) My mother and a sister survived. The parents shortly afterwards went their different ways and my mother went at an early age to be brought up by Elizabeth Tovey, now married to a kindly widower named George Snook. That trio moved out of Birmingham to Station Road, Knowle in around 1905, to live next-door-but one to George Snook's daughter, who was married to a man named Thompson.
The information on the census returns, mentioned by MWS, is certainly a true reflection of the situation for 1901. For 1911, however, it isn't! It is pretty certain that the two sisters had been split up by then and I know, for various reasons, that that split was a very definite and permanent one and that my mother was firmly established within the Snook household by then. It may be that, for reasons unknown and somehow or other, the census entry was falsified; or that there remained a lingering, occasional relationship with the mother and that Elsie was caught by the census when making a visit to her.
As Janice confirms, George Snook was previously married (1862) to Mary Ann Tovey and after her death married her sister Elizabeth (and son - 1877). He was able to give my mother a rather better start to life than she would otherwise have had, I suspect. And great credit to him for being willing to take on a young step-granddaughter at a relatively late stage in life, some forty years after his own children had started to appear. He and Elizabeth had been gone about 13 years before I appeared on the scene but I knew my grandfather - a product of 1870s Victorian Birmingham - quite well and retain fond memories of him in his terraced cottage in High Street, Harborne.
(I suspect that a number Birmingham Toveys are descended from a James Tovey who moved his family to the city in the mid-1860s following a change in paper-making technology in his home town of Winchcombe. He was the father of Mary Ann and Elizabeth and was described as a wire weaver which was a specialised, skilled trade within the paper industry. George Snook was another incomer, from Salisbury, at around the same time).
To follow - a bit more about the Thompsons at 152 Station Road whose lives were, for obvious reasons, closely entwined with those of the Snooks.
Chris
