This week, I have done some more research on Anna and her husband, Gilbert Hawtrey, and I have managed to clear up a couple of the questions from my last related post . To refresh our memories, if you can’t be bothered to click back to the other post, here are the questions:
Why was Anna in England in 1908?
Was Gilbert a permanent resident of the US from 1898 onwards?
How did Gilbert and Anna meet?
Did they really go to Canada and Germany? If so, why?
Did Anna have Parkinson’s disease or similar?
I think I have found the answers to two of the questions:
Why was Anna in England in 1908 [so she was able to meet Gilbert]?
Well, I don’t think she necessarily was in England in 1908 - I think it might be more likely that Gilbert was in Sweden. However, that really doesn’t help very much as it just reverses the question to ‘why was Gilbert in Sweden?’ I have yet to find that out.
Did they really go to Canada and Germany? If so, why?
Having now looked again at the ships’ records, I don’t think Anna or Gilbert did go to Canada or Germany. At first sight, it looks like Anna, at least, did depart from Bremen (port in Germany) in 1932, but I think that this was just where the ship’s original departure port was - not where she borded the ship, which is more likely to have been Southampton, UK. Likewise, it looks like Canada was the final destination of the ship Anna was on, rather than where she disembarked, which was actually New York, if I have now read the records correctly.
In case of interest, I have created a timeline for Anna (on Ancestry), a version of which is below:
