Where on Earth did they meet?

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Valentine 

Where on earth did they meet? 

On March 31 1901 my grandmother, Emma Carr, was at home in Birmingham, England.  She was a spinster, 40 years old, living with her widowed mother and one of her sisters. The family had lived at 88 Gough Road, Edgbaston, since Emma was ten years old, and she had been at home whenever the census-taker came around.  

Yet On 21 September 1901, that 40year-old spinster was married – in Brooklyn New York.  

I cannot for the life of me figure out how she got there, or where and how she had met her husband.  The man she married, Robert Macnee, was from Glasgow but had left Scotland for the New World in the 1890s.  Robert was an accountant.  He had established a business in New York, but frequently crossed the Atlantic to conduct business in Liverpool.  During these visits he would travel north to visit his family in Glasgow, but I have no evidence that he ever went to Birmingham or crossed paths with Emma Carr.

The wedding took place at the Ocean Hill Reformed Church, 248 Saratoga Avenue, Brooklyn.  The marriage certificate provided a wealth of information, not all of it accurate.  In fact it took a long time before I came to accept that this really was Emma Jane Carr of Edgbaston.  

The groom was certainly my grandfather.  The certificate gave his full name, Robert Hamilton Macnee; his birthplace as Falkirk, Scotland, and his parents’ names as Robert Macnee and Elizabeth Hamilton – all facts of which I was already aware.  According to the certificate, he was living in Brooklyn, at 630 Macon Street, while Emma gave her address as the St. Denis Hotel, Broadway.  Robert, who perennially misstated his age, reported that he was 38, when he was in fact 44.  It also revealed that he was widowed and that this was his second marriage, the first indication I had that he had been married before.  

But then the problems begin.  Emma’s age was given as 27 indicating that she was born in 1873 or 1874.  She was born in Handsworth, England, not far from Edgbaston, and her parents were Deodatus Carr and Ann Robertson, these are the first clues I have of my grandmother’s family of origin.  Deodatus Carr and his wife, whose name was Ann Robinson not Robertson, did indeed have a daughter Emma, but she was born in 1860.  And this Emma was a spinster, living in England with her widowed mother, only six months before this wedding in New York.

I tried out all kinds of hypotheses.  Was she an imposter, who stole an English woman’s identity?  Not judging by the fact that Emma returned to England and was on good terms with her family.  Had she been “with child?”  If so, it wasn’t my father. Emma and Robert lived in New Jersey, from where Robert commuted to his office on Broad Street, Manhattan, and where my father was born in 1903.  Though the inaccuracies on the marriage certificate do suggest that there might have been some speed: the mis-recording of her mother’s name being the most telling.  Finally, after lots and lots of research, I am certain that these two records - the March census and the September marriage - represent the same person.

But most mystifying to me is that I can find no record of an Emma Carr traveling from England to the United States in 1901.  So not only how did they meet but how in earth did she get to New York?  Did she plan to marry?  Did she know Robert before she traveled?  Oh so many questions, but no answers.  But I like to think that it just might have been a love match.