Cats in the Kitchen, Flora in the Garden

Over the past eighteen months, I have been researching my family history and after visiting one of my blogging friends, who had posted about her family, I thought I would relate just a little about some things I have learnt so far. Thank you to my blogging friend for this idea. This photograph opposite is of my great-grandfather, Alfred, who came from an army family, I have got back as far as my three-greats grandfather and upto and including Alfred they were all army men. My great great grandfather, Charles, was actually in the Indian Mutiny and is mentioned in dispatches. It is very strange, but interesting, to realise your connection to events in history. Both Charles and Alfred had much gentler occupations in later life. Charles was a musician and piano teacher [although he was a bandsmaster when in the army] and Alfred became a gardener and always had a deep love of flowers. I often wonder if their hard lives in the army turned them towards gentler occupations in civilian life. Charles went all over the world with the army and his children were born in India, Canada, Malta and even on the high seas.


This is Alfred in later life, I always think he looks a dashing figure of a man. I will post a photograph of his wife Mary sometime. They seem to have been a lot of fun and a pair of gadabouts. They met because Mary worked at the large house at the top of the road where Alfred's family lived. They then both turn up in London, some 360 miles away, to get married, although Alfred was still in the army at this time. Later they are in married quarters in the town they met, and when he came out of the army they settled up here in the north. There are only two reasons they could have married so far away in Southwark, London. One was because the family, Mary worked for had a large London residence, or two because Alfred was in quarters down there, or perhaps it was a combination of the two. There is no one left who can tell me, my mother does not know anything about it, but these little mysteries can sometimes be solved. Why though, do we just seem to find an interest in things like this when older generations, who might have known are no longer with us. These photos are from my Mother's side of the family.


This photograph, the quality of which is dreadful, shows my great grandmother on my Father's side, Mina. She is in the middle surrounded by eleven of her thirteen surviving children. She had a baby nearly every year, well at roughly fifteen month intervals. Can you imagine that? Obviously, by the time the last one was born the older ones would have moved out to live lives of their own. I often sit and think about the sort of life she had, one baby after another, and the sorrow of one or two dead children, how did she manage, or was it a case of knowing no other life and women just got on with it? Both Mina and her husband John, were born in Co Wicklow in Ireland. She was married at fourteen years of age, marriage at that time was permitted that young. There is a family tale that she didn't want to get married, and cried and wanted to out and play with her friends instead, so what the circumstances were who can now tell. By the time she was sixteen, she had emigrated to England with her husband, her baby and her husband's cousin. The first census record of them is very confusing. You can imagine the scene, they probably could not read or write and spoke with broad Irish accents, the census man seemed to have great difficulty understanding them and each one's surname is spelt with a slight variation on what it really was. The census record does not seem to have a clear idea of their exact ages, even the child's, but her husband was obviously working in an iron ore mine.



This photograph, better quality, shows Mina and her husband John, the woman at the back is their second eldest child, Kate, who would be about twenty six and the little girl between them is their youngest child, my grandmother, Lily, who is about three years old at the time. Lily was their last child. What shocks me is the fact that Mina would just have been forty five when this photograph was taken, and John would have been forty eight. When I first saw that photograph I thought it was of grandparents, daughter and granddaughter, but no it is children and parents. This is a woman younger than I am. Thank goodness times have changed, although I have nothing but admiration for the women of that time, who managed to bring up very large families in what was to us very basic conditions.

Another day I will show you some more old photographs and tell their stories. I do have two wonderful large group wedding photographs, one from Edwardian times and one from the 1920's. They are delightful and I have both framed and hung on my dining room wall.