As our research progressed we became aware of the uniqueness of the surname Emptage and a growing belief that the ancestors of all the Emptages and Emtages spread across England and the rest of the world today not only originated in the small Isle of Thanet, on the eastern tip of the county of Kent, in England but that they were probably here in Anglo-Saxon times. And so began a worldwide study of the name.
When the average life span for an adult male born in the early 1800s was not much above 50 years, James Robert Emptage defied all the odds and lived to be 101.
Was his great age attributable to his genes or to something else?
The mystery of Emily Henrietta Emptage’s marriage
Emily Henrietta Emptage married in Hull in 1886, when she was supposedly 21. Her husband, William Edmonson Chafer jumped ship in Melbourne, Australia in 1887. Emily joined him in there in 1889. But a family myth disputes the facts.
Avis Emptage and Harold Harding
Avis Emptage had a difficult and complicated life but in 1913 she married Harold Harding and could have hoped for years of happiness to come. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
The Elephant Trainer and the Missing Husband
John William Benjamin Emptage was 20 when he married Emily Dixon Philpott, 17, in 1876 in Margate. In 1881 they were together with their young daughter but, as far as the records show, that was the last time the family was together and John William had disappeared. What had happened to John and what came next for Emily?
Child Migration
For more than 100 years, child migration schemes removed children from their families and friends and the places they knew. The children were sent to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia. Supposedly to give children with poor lives a better chance, it was also a means of increasing the population of these still new countries. At least three of the children were Emptages.
Ann Phoebe Emptage nee Hopkins
Ann Phoebe Hopkins was brought up in Canterbury, inland from the Kent coast. So the life she experienced in Margate after she married Alfred Burnett Emptage, a mariner and lifeboat man, was quite different from anything she had experienced previously or could even have imagined.