Bigamy and a Good Turn 120 years later
by Robyn Watters
Last year my daily walk took me past the walls of memorial plaques in the Springvale Botanical Cemetery and I would look sadly at the bright orange ‘expired’ stickers on many of the plaques. This ominous warning sticker meant the deceased estate had only paid for a limited tenure for the plaque to be displayed. When the time was up, the plaque is removed and ashes behind the plaque scattered or passed to any relatives that can still be contacted. Little did I know that one of those plaques belonged to my great aunt by marriage and that she needed to be ‘rescued’ from being forgotten and literally scattered to the four winds.
Enjoying family history, I decided to investigate what happened to Eliza Wilkinson, 16-year-old bride of my great uncle James Edward Watters (1881 – 1926) of the Port Melbourne Watters family.[1] Eliza and James’ 1904 marriage came unstuck as James’ death certificate in 1926 made no mention of having ever married even though the informant knew he had been.[2] Divorce records proved fruitless hardly unsurprising for an engine fitter and domestic to attempt this arduous process. What happened to James Watters’ bride Eliza?
To ascertain this, I constructed Eliza’s family tree and discovered she made a bigamous second marriage in 1918 in Sydney to Dutchman Frank Steffens with Eliza bending the truth about her first marriage on her second marriage certificate.[3] Her mother’s death notice in 1940 gave another clue referring as it did to Eliza as “Mrs. Steffens”.[4] As her first (and only) husband James Watters had died in 1926, it was now safe for Eliza to come out of the woods publicly as “Mrs. Steffens”.
Given the great effluxion of time, I knew Eliza would have died and located her memorial and cremated remains at the Springvale Botanical Cemetery. The only contact the Cemetery had for her was a defunct solicitor so I stepped in as her next of kin. Her plaque is now with me and her remains are scattered in a garden setting.
Married the first time for possibly only a year or two, then having no contact with a Watters for well over a century, it seems incredible that a Watters finally did something for Eliza!
Vale Eliza (Eleiza) Christina Wilkinson Watters Steffens (1887 – 1969).
[1] Birth certificate for James Edward Watters, born 1881; Registrar of Births Deaths and Marriages Victoria, 9555/1881; Death certificate for James Edward Watters, died 27 March 1926, Registrar of Births, Deaths.
[2] Marriage certificate for James Edward Watters, married 17 March 1904, Registrar of Births Deaths and Marriages Victoria 1934/1904.
[3] Marriage Certificate for Eliza Cooper and Frank Theodor Conrad Steffens, married 22 October 1918, Registrar of Births Deaths and Marriages, Waverley Registration District, New South Wales, 1918/12083.
[4] ‘Death Notices’, Age, 19 September 1940, p.1
