On 1 May 1869, Annie married John Chapman, a coachman, at All Saints Church in the Knightsbridge district of London. Their residence on the marriage certificate is listed as 29 Montpelier Place, Brompton (Kensington, Middlesex). In 1870 they moved to 1 Brook Mews in Bayswater (within the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in central London), and their first daughter Emily Ruth was born. John worked as a Domestic Head Coachman. In 1873 they moved to 17 South Bruton Mews, Berkeley Square (West End, City of Westminster) when their second daughter, Annie Georgina, was born. In 1880 they had a son, John Alfred, who was a cripple and sent to a home or charity school. In 1881 the family moved to Windsor, Berkshire, where John Chapman took a job as coachman to a farm bailiff, Josiah Weeks. But young John had been born disabled, while their firstborn, Emily Ruth, died of meningitis shortly after at the age of 12. Soon afterward, both Chapman and her husband took to heavy drinking and separated in 1884. After she and her husband separated, she had received an allowance of 10 shillings a week from him, but at the end of 1886 the payments stopped abruptly. On inquiring why they had stopped, she found her husband had died of alcohol-related causes. By the time of her murder, young John was said to be in the care of a charitable school and the surviving daughter Annie Georgina, then an adolescent, traveling with a circus in the French Third Republic.