The Literary Marriages – A family of authors at the turn of the 20th century

The Marriage Family

Family tradition has it that we are descended from Huguenot refugees who emigrated from France in the seventeenth century. We are certainly descended from Francis and Mary Marriage (Mariage?) of that time, but the family name may have been in England long before that.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Surnames the name Marriage is derived from a lost place in Essex and from a word meaning boundary gate and from a boundary- or meadow-ridge. It seems that some forms of the name go back to the 13th century. Current members are to be found in Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand as well as Britain. Some were Quakers, some perhaps Huguenots.

The branch of the family that we are on has been documented with a large family tree, originally constructed in the 1920s and kept up to date since. It starts with Francis and Mary Marriage, whose ten children were born over the period 1657 – 1674. We are 8 generations after them.

Ernest and his sisters

This is the developing story of my grandfather Ernest Marriage, his wife and his sisters, all of whom were publishing books and articles around the turn of the 20th century.