CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

ANOTHER MARRIAGE?

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

—Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde

Bigamy is the only crime in America where two rites make a wrong.

—Bob Hope

National Archives of Australia, Victorian Archives Centre, 99 Shiel Street, North Melbourne, Victoria State, Australia, November 8, 2015

Newcomers to the Mission–Elder Samuel and Ethyl Breckinridge from Toronto–were avid genealogists on their own time, working for Ancestry.com as professionals before being called on a mission for the church. They were a perfect fit—everything good that everyone said about Canadians–their affability, calm temperament, slow to anger, eager to please, good education, conservative devotion to their church, and an avid curiosity about the world around them. Someone told them about the research project to find out all that could be found regarding a mysterious woman called Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov. They never watched television and were not particularly keen readers; so, they settled right in to the search.

Ethyl had learned that Alexandra had been married, although there were no certain records of a marriage yet documented that she could find. She laboriously scoured the New South Wales and Victoria provincial marriage records with the presumption that she must have married sometime in her late teens or early twenties as most girls did in the nineteenth century. She knew Alexandra’s birthdate: 5 April, 1861 in Balagansk, Far Eastern Russia. She did the math and began to search records in Victoria from 1875 to 1896 when she would have been thirty-five years old. Nothing. She looked in Irkutsk oblast in Russia during the same years. Nothing. She was about to give up; but she decided that their Alexandra may have been something of a nonconformist; so, she searched later years; and finally–in the records for 1899–she found a verifiable document. Verifiable because the missionaries already had a request for probate filed by a man stating that he was Alexandra’s husband, Kyle Dewit Herman Bradshaw, in 1931.

The marriage date listed in the probate request for Bradshaw and Alexandra Yusupov was 4 September, 1900. The missionaries knew that this was one of the major milestones in her life, but it also brought up certain questions uncomfortable to the pious family-oriented Mormon missionaries: Did she ever get a divorce from her first husband? She had children by the first husband. What became of them? The missionaries dedicated themselves to finding the answers to those questions—or else they would have to conclude that their sweet Alexandra was a bigamist. That was unacceptable.

The records experts were tired missionaries by afternoon on this P-day. They were determined to wake back up with their weekly walking tour through Melbourne. Their planning took them on a bus to East Melbourne to see the step back into the Victorian era with its enclave of Victorian homes, neat inviting streets, pubs, B&Bs, Darling Square, and for a stop at the graceful bluestone mansion of the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne. They wanted to try to learn something about one of Australia’s mysterious sporting obsessions, cricket. They visited the MCG [Melbourne Cricket Ground] and were given a tutorial on the game in the library of the museum. They were all more confused about cricket when they came out than when they entered the building. They were pretty much lost after the first statement by the librarian, “Cricket is a bat and ball game.” Terms such as runs, innings, bowl and field, bowler delivering the ball, hitting the stumps, dislodging the ball, leg before wicket, Twenty20 (twenty overs), to say nothing of the labyrinthine Laws of Cricket would have to be fodder for study some other day.

Elder Glen Gabler said, “I guess I’m just not smart enough to play cricket.”

This said by an M.D., PhD.