Emily Leah Green was born in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1883, the daughter of Charles and Edith Jane Green (née Richards). Her father was a carpenter and Emily was the middle child of the three children in the family. Her mother died in 1894 and her father later re-married. The family had resided for many years in Malpas, Monmouthshire, before they moved to Sutton Coalfield, Warwickshire.
On completing her education, Emily became a dressmaker, and then, in September 1907, she boarded the Empress of Ireland in Liverpool and disembarked some days later in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She was accompanied by her father and step-mother, and their ultimate destination was Haileybury, Ontario, where Emily’s fiancé was waiting for her.
On the 26th October 1907, she married William Wilson in Haileybury. Her husband was a carpenter originally from King’s Norton, Worcestershire, England, and it was likely they had met and become engaged before he had immigrated to Canada.
The couple did not settle in Haileybury, for on the 15th May 1910, their first child, a son named Frank Edward, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the United States of America, and their second, a girl named Dorothy Alice, was born in Toronto, Ontario,
Canada, on the 10th March 1913.
By the spring of 1915, the family decided to return to Great Britain, and William Wilson decided to travel ahead of his wife and children, to obtain work and find a home for them in Newport, Monmouthshire. Having secured accommodation at 14. Raglan Street, Risca, Newport, and presumably, finding employment, he sent for his family.
While waiting for word from William Wilson, his wife and children stayed with relatives in Springfield, Massachusetts. Emily and her two children were booked as third class passengers on the May sailing of the Lusitania, which was due to sail from New York on the morning of May Day, 1915.
Nothing much more is known about the family apart from the fact that they would have arrived at the Cunard berth at Pier 54 in New York in time for the liner’s scheduled 10.00 a.m. departure from the port and then would have had to have waited for the liner to sail, as she had to load cargo and take on board passengers and crew from Anchor Liner the S.S. Cameronia which the British Admiralty had requisitioned as a troop ship at the end of April.
Six days out of New York, on the afternoon of 7th May, the Lusitania was torpedoed by the German submarine U-20, twelve miles off The Old Head of Kinsale in southern Ireland and she sank after only eighteen minute. At that stage of her voyage, she was a mere twelve or fourteen hours away from her Liverpool destination.
None of the Wilson family survived this action and as none of their bodies were ever recovered and identified afterwards, none has a known grave.
Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, Monmouthshire Wales Anglican Baptisms 1551 – 1994, Ontario Canada Marriages 1826 – 1938, Massachusetts U.S. Birth Records 1840 – 1915, Ontario Canada Births 1832 – 1916, 1891 Census of England & Wales, 1901 Census of England & Wales, Canadian Passenger Lists 1865 – 1935, Cunard Records, Western Mail, Deaths at Sea 1871 – 1968, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.