Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unknown Poster
Either Augustus had a previous wife or he liked to marry young as it appears his 36 year old wife has a 23 year old daughter. Common at the time?
Also, what does a Lodger do and why would a 9 year old be doing it (unless those numbers mean something else).
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He was married in 1886, but his first wife died due to complications from childbirth in 1887. That child survived though, and is the daughter named aged 23. He married his second wife in 1894. She was 13 or 14 years his junior and they had six children together.
A lodger is a renter. It appears that the lodgers would be a single widowed mother and her child. They may have been relations or perhaps family of staff. A single mother in her 40s would have extreme difficulty at the time raising a child and would either have to find a man (usually a much older widower) to support her, work in a very low paying occupation that would provide a meager existence or make a living bootlegging or providing other "services".
During and after WWI there was massive inflation and increases in labour costs. Even by the early 1920s the estate would have been too costly to maintain. House sizes shrunk by half as modern technologies made domestic help largely redundant. By the 1930s the value was in the land only. Property is only worth as much as someone is prepared to pay for it. A large number of McMansions from the 1990s and 2000s may see the same fate.
The Nantons may have been unlucky with their investments, perhaps they lost it all after '29, but it would appear that the family fortune had disappeared by 1935. Mrs. Nanton probably sold low to the highest bidder. Housing prices in the mid 30s were lower than they had been 20 years prior. Biographies of the children suggest that they ended up having a very middle class existence as one of the sons was
employed by the family firm, in a middle management position.