Who in the world was Ivy Francis Smith?

I wrote in my previous post about the surprise discovery that Ivy Francis Smith, child of Emily and William Smith, was actually a girl, not a boy. ivy was, of course, the contemporary of my grandfather, David Scott Ritchie Jr. She is one of the siblings whose lives I am currently investigating in order to locate contemporaries of mine who might function as second cousins by virtue of shared adoptive great-grandparents.

Grandad was obviously not Ivy's biological brother because he was the son of Maude and David Ritchie. Maude, you will remember, was in full-time service as a live-in cook, while David was in the London County Asylum being treated for insanity. Ivy, on the other hand, appears to have been fostered. When she lists herself on the 1939 Register along with two other members of the Smith family, she gives her surname as "Batchelor [Fordham[".

Now, it would make sense if Ivy was born Fordham and married somebody called Batchelor before 1939. However, things weren't that simple. I found a marriage record stating that Ivy F Fordham married James L Batchelor in Wandsworth, but the marriage date is 1945. Could it be that Ivy and James became engaged or unofficially married before he went to war and only registered the event after he returned?

There were no children, which is not surprising, considering that Ivy would have been 37 at the start of the Second World War and 43 when the war ended. She lived till the age of 76 and died in Wandsworth in 1978.

Am I disappointed with these findings? Yes, in a way, because ivy and James' children would have been contemporaries of my mother and aunt, and it would have been interesting to learn about where they lived and what kind of careers they followed. Their children, in turn, would have been accessible online to me today, and I could have contacted them via Facebook or some other social media network to compare notes about Emily and William Smith. Yet I have no other connection to the Fordham family besides the fact that ivy, like Grandad, spent many years living with Maude's sister Emily. I might just be wasting my time if I work on taking this line of inquiry further.

At this point, I feel rather stuck with regard to the members of the Smith household. If all of the Smith children were fostered or adopted as I suspect, I should rather focus my attention on something else. Admittedly, I could be missing some important clues by not consulting newspaper archives, and perhaps I will seek help at some stage in this regard. At present, I'm only able to consult records which have been transcribed and are accessible to my screen-reader.

Photo credit: "1941 Soda Ad, Royal Crown Soda with British Actress Anna Neagle" by Classic Film.