Cranston woman marries Utah man she met through magazine ad

Posted 4/6/22

When Lydia Ann Thomas of North Kings-town married stonecutter George Partlow Austin on Oct. 13, 1872, she undoubtedly saw a long, happy marriage existing between them. Sadness reigned when George …

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Cranston woman marries Utah man she met through magazine ad

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When Lydia Ann Thomas of North Kings-town married stonecutter George Partlow Austin on Oct. 13, 1872, she undoubtedly saw a long, happy marriage existing between them. Sadness reigned when George died only ten years later at the age of 44. Lydia, however, decided to keep searching for her happily-ever-after.

In 1889, the 54-year-old widow began reading “Home Mag-azine” and noticed a section of the publication contained short ads and the mailing addresses of people seeking personal corre-spondence with others. She be-gan writing letters to a man named Henry Goldsborough Carroll, a 74-year-old Utah man who had been widowed by his wife Jane (Cooper) six years earlier.

The father of three adult sons and one daughter, Henry was a native of England and operated a shop with his son William which was known as “H.G. Carroll & Son – architects & designers”. At the shop, they manufactured machinist’s models and patented items and repaired surgical im-plements and anything else. Henry was a master mechanic and his son would go on to be-come a highly successful archi-tect in Utah.

Lydia and Henry decided to marry, sight unseen. On the morning of Aug. 14, 1889, he arrived at her home in Cranston, one of four apartments within a two-story house at the corner of Church Street and Knightsville Road.   

Lydia was intelligent and at-tractive. Henry was of average height with gray hair and a gray beard. They decided they liked each other well enough and, that afternoon, they were married. Henry’s intentions were to open up a shop in Providence, much like the one he had run in Utah.

He did eventually open a shop, after he deserted Lydia. The shop was housed in the living room of a home he was renting and it was discovered that he had a woman living there in the shop room. In the fall of 1892, Lydia filed for divorce, charging him with abandonment and co-habitating with another woman.

Henry returned to Utah. On the afternoon of Dec. 17, 1895, he was discovered dead in his lodgings on South Temple Street in Salt Lake City. He had been ill for quite some time and it was estimated he had been dead since Dec. 13. He was buried beside his first wife in Provo.

Lydia died on April 25, 1908 of heart disease at the Home for Aged Women in Providence. Although she had resumed her former married name, she was not buried beside George at Riv-er Bend Cemetery in Westerly, but in Elm Grove Cemetery in North Kingstown.   

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.

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