Part Two: The second theory

Now, to the other story.

The old gag, was that we were from circus folk. It was what my grandfather had mentioned, that the mystery man worked at a circus.

Chapman. Circus. Since I had no full name to work with, a googling I went and searched for those two words.

My first real result was a paragraph on the curious fox site;

George Bruce Chapman Born Northampton,and buried there,owned circus,are there any decendents.

Which gave a few details and some more clues. Working with what I had so far, it confirmed a couple of things.
First off, my grandfather had had a memory of his father. It was when he was four and a man in a suit and hat - came to see him, had him on his lap and gave him a shilling (or thrupence) coin.

Considering that my grandfather was born in 1931, during the depression, the fact that this man was in a suit and hat and had a coin to give him says a lot about the man's finances. He had wealth to spare.

Another, was the man's name. George Bruce Chapman. But what I soon discovered on the find my past site was that Chapman, even when limited to Northampton and born around the same time period as my great grandmother, still gave me a lot of George Chapman's to look at.

What I needed, was a definite age to work with.

A very useful feature on the find my past uk site is the newspaper/periodicals search. Typing in George Bruce Chapman as a person and adding Circus in the keyword search space, turned up a lot of information and articles that helped paint the picture of the man I was trying to find.

The most useful set of articles (as far as discovering his age - and from there, when he was born) were centred on a breach of promise brought against Chapman in court, by a girl twenty years his junior.  (Not my great grandmother, - she was only four years younger than Mr Chapman - but another woman entirely) In 1934, but the affair began in 1930.

The articles mentioned his age at the time, and from there, I was able to work out his year of birth and soon, his parents, and siblings.

But back to the breach of promise suit, the articles all mentioned something important. First off, Mr Chapman was already married and with a daughter the same age as the girl he had been involved with.

This would explain why he was not going to divorce for another woman entirely. One wonders about Mrs Chapman, what she thought of all this.

There were several articles published in various publications, but what really nailed it, was that there was an article pertaining to this court case, published in The Mail on the 16th of June (1934), a publication based in South Australia.