Notes of Life

This afternoon Sarah invited me down to her place for a drink and a chat.

I’ve known Sarah all my life, from being tiny tots, through our teens and now we’re nearly at the end of our twenties. Even our families go way back… Sarah’s Great Great Grandmother was my Great Granddad’s 2nd wife - I guess you could say she was my Great Step-Grandmother! That would make Sarah a step-cousin somewhere along the line!

Anyway, we got talking about family history and Sarah produced a folder full of photos. She looked at one, looked at its back and passed it to me.

I didn’t need to see the back of the photo, I knew the face. There, a young man dressed in a soldier’s uniform looked out from the photo with a slight smile on his face. His face tells me he’d not yet endured WW1. He’d not yet trudged through the mud in Europe, been wounded & captured or seen the hell that they call a battlefield. His face tells me it was yet to come.

I’d never seen a photo of Granddad Charlie looking young. He always seemed to look old in photos taken after the war. Even Dad says Granddad Charlie always looked old. It may be just his facial expression, but to me Granddad looks older than his years in the photo below, taken after WW1. He would have been in his mid twenties.

Sarah had one or two other photos I would like to borrow, so I’ll ask her about them when I return Granddad’s photo.

Photo 1 courtesy of Sarah. Photo 2 is from my collection.

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve been invited to be a guest author at Shades of the Departed!

I have been asked to write a post about “Documenting Today For Tomorrow’s History” along with how I document my life. My post will be up at Shades tomorrow (so don’t forget to check it out!), but for now why not take a look at what Shades has to offer.

Shades of the Departed

In the past I have found the Halton Information Network very useful. Last year it helped me find newspaper references (birth, marriage and obituary notices) to my Great Great Great Uncle Bert and his family. Once again it has proved very useful. This time I believe I have found a photo of him.

Uncle Bert, age 23, left England and his family and sailed to Quebec, Canada in 1904. As far as I know, he went on his own - such a big step for a young man brought up in the countryside. He moved to Burlington, Ontatio where he spent the rest of his life (as far as I know) and never returned home. He married twice, outliving both wives, and had a couple of children. He was an employee of the Burlington Water Works, an operator for 40 years and an inspector for a number of years. Bert was a member of St. Luke’s Anglican Church, and also a member of the Foresters, and the Burlington Horticultural Society.

Uncle Bert sent letters home. Nan gave me a few of them and from reading them I can tell he missed home, but he loved Canada too. One of his letters from 1953 reads:

“I wish I could walk in some morning and see you. I am sure it would be a great treat. You know I wouldn’t mind walking up the hill to see your Granny. What fun it would be.”

“Granny” was his little sister, my Great Great Nan. Granny would have loved to have seen Bert walking up the hill, after all she hadn’t seen him for nearly 50 years by then!

Uncle Bert died in 1958. His daughter Mary continued writing to family back home in England (who at that time she’d never met) while Uncle Bert was ill and then after he died. Mary’s daughter Sharon also wrote letters, but lost contact in the mid 1970s.

I contacted the Burlington Historical Society about the photo of Uncle Bert and an archives volunteer kindly responded. She assured me that the photo more than likely is him as there was only 1 engineer with his name. She has said she’s going to look at the original photo and file tomorrow to see if she can tell me any more about him and that she’ll add any notes I have to the file. I’m hoping she’ll be able to provide me with a higher resolution scan of the photo so I can show it to Nan as I’m sure she’d love to see it. I’m sure the Historial Society also have a photo of Bert’s son-in-law so I’m going to enquire about that too.

We have a couple of boxes of old family photos. We don’t know who some of the people are in the photos, but others provide small windows in to the lives of ancestors.

The photo on the right is one I scanned in on Sunday afternoon. It shows my Great Grandparents stood outside their home on the Shropshire/Cheshire border. It helps show how my Grandparents lived. Unfortunately, I’ve been told that the house has long gone so I can’t see what it looks like today. However, the cottage they moved into in their later years still stands and looks a lot like it did back in their day.

The photo needed a bit of a tidy-up. It was under-exposed and torn around the edges. So I cropped it down and use a couple of different adjustments (in Photoshop CS3) including Brightness/Contrast and Exposure.

Other items I scanned on Sunday included a couple of family wedding photos, my Great Great Grandmother Mary Jane’s obituary and a wedding notice for a Great Great Aunt.

I really need to set aside more time to sit and scan more photos. Something which might help with this is the Spring Break Scan-a-Thon (29th March - 6th April) and the next Scanfest on 30th March (as mentioned by Miriam at Ancestories). I think I should mark those dates in my diary and maybe I’ll get through some of those photos.

Following on from my research on Henry Purslow and his family, I now can confirm that he and Jane did have a daughter called Elizabeth. She was born in 1841 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. This still leaves a 10 year gap between Elizabeth and Henry junior… Something to work on.

On another side of my family… Yesterday I received the death certificate of my Great Great Great Grandfather John Middleton. In 1899 he accidently fell from his cart while driving and subsiquently died. Sadly, the death certificate doesn’t give any details as to any injuries sustained in the fall or the exact cause of death. I guess only the coroner’s report at the inquest can give me those details and that’s only if it still exists. A trip to the Shropshire Archives may be in order!

I’m still alive and kicking, but no results from the hospital yet. Not that I expect to hear anything for another couple of weeks yet and I full expect the results to come back negative… They always do with me! It’s good in a way, but also anoying because it means there’s still no proper answer. We shall see.