Curatorial Heart Attack (Almost)

Yesterday evening brought with it an important discovery (wait for it), and at the tail end of documenting that, I discovered, in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post for October 4, 1855, this heart-stopper:

Now, when this happened, I did bother to track down Ashburton, and found it, there at the edge of Dartmoor, but I didn't stop to think for a moment about the date -- October of 1855 -- or the fact that Emma and her mother were already in the United States, having spent the summer theatre season of 1855 doing Shakespeare in Paris. I just -- went immediately into reconstruction model: de-emphasizing those bits and pieces of Emma's early life that were inconsistent with this new fact, raising up the bits that made more sense (the story of the man she left behind), etc. And making up thematics -- very important. Young (well, young-ish) actress, with an eye on the main chance, seen by young man from the provinces at the theatre, decides to chuck it all for the security of wife-li-ness, but almost immediately reconsiders....my my how the melodramatic tropes of our common lives infiltrate everything.

All of that happened in, oh, thirty seconds or so, before I processed the date of the entry, and realized this was not our Emma.

A quick trip to the census database, and, indeed, Charles and Emma Stentiford (what a killer name) are easily trackable in the census data until near the end of the century, and wind up in Canada, with a big family and what looks, from the census records, to be a good life.

Definitely time to listen to Robert Francis read his poem on history again....