EARLY MARRIAGE

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 October 1939, Page 14

EARLY MARRIAGE

A FAMILY TRADITION LONDON, August 19. It is a tradition in a Richmond, London family, that each child shall marry in its teens and have the first child within a year of marriage. The family has two great-grandmothres still in middle-age and a grandmother of 35. The tradition has held good for four generations. It went a stage further this week when a baby daughter Avas bor-- 1 . Joan Claxton, of Chaucer Avenue, Richmond, who was married last year when aged 17. Until this latest arrival Mrs Claxton was herself the youngest in the sequence. The tradition runs through the women’s side of the family because the first-born in each generation has been a girl. In Queen Victoria’s reign Mr. and Mrs. Edward Stevens, of Manor Grove, Richmond, married when they were 20, and had their first child, a daughter, Lily, when they were 21. The daughter was married at 16 to Mr. lan Sinclair, and lived in Chaucer Avenue, Richmond. Before she was IS she was the mother of a baby girl, Joan. The baby girl has now grown up. Two years ago she married Mr. George Claxton, a neighbour of the Sinclairs in Chaucer Avenue, when she was 16. Now, at IS, she has become a mother.

Great-grandmother Mrs. Stevens is 55. Grandmother Mrs. Sinclair is 35. There is also a Mrs. Sinclair, another great-grandmother, a,ged 57.