When an ancestor dies, leaving behind a wife and children, you don’t usually have too much hassle finding his widow on the next census. If she’s still young, she may be trying to bring up the family alone, perhaps working as a dressmaker or milliner to make ends meet. If she’s older, you might find her living with one of her married children, tucked away at the bottom of a census household as ‘mother’.
But what I’ve never come across before is anyone quite like my 2x great-grandmother Emma…
When John Anthony Riboldi died in 1869, aged 46, his wife Emma Susannah Riboldi was still only 28. During their 11-year marriage, she’d conceived seven children – one died as an infant, and the youngest was born only weeks
