2024 Week 42: Full House #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

My husband Martin's ancestors all tended to have big families and the family Martin grew up in was no exception - he had seven brothers and two sisters! Whereas in the past these large families lived in crammed accommodation, despite the size of his family, they had more than enough space, though it could be always be described as a 'full house'.

The house in question is a stone built Georgian house from around the 1820s. Martin's father, a successful businessman, knew a bargain when he came across one. When he first saw the house in 1960, it was in a terrible state, with holes in the roof and rotten floorboards. The huge garden was waist high in weeds. He bought it for the sum of £1000 and spent the best part of a year repairing and restoring the house and garden to their former states to be a lovely busy home for his large and growing family.

If ten children and two adults were not enough, his Aunt Mary, a lady with special needs, came to live with them after the death of her mother. Both of Martin's parents had experienced poverty at earlier times in their lives, so they were always willing to open their house to homeless people. It was not uncommon for the children to eat with a homeless man at lunch or dinner time and one man, a Glaswegian called Davy Jones, stayed with the family for over eighteen months.

And then - if that was not enough - after school the children used to bring home many of their friends to play in the house or the garden. Some of these children came from poor families, still living with an outdoor toilet at their home. Martin's mum would see that these children all got a hot bath before they returned home. Sometimes Martin's father would drive them home in his fancy Rolls Royce!!

When the children grew up, the house was split into two then three - two ground floor flats and the main 'house' and one of Martin's brothers and his wife and his elder sister continued to live on in the flats.

The house even then became a hub for visiting family, but when all the visitors left it must have felt very empty for the parents, given what it had been like previously. Martin's parents died within a month of each other in 2012, with his mum dying in the house she had lived in for 62 years. The house was sold a year later and since then it has changed hands a couple of times.

Few people can have been brought up in a house that was so busy, boisterous and full.

Comments

Week 50: You wouldn't believe it! #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

I have already written about my 3 x great uncle, James McAra, who was sentenced to deportation at the High Court in Edinburgh in 1811. His crime had been to attack his brother, my 3 x great grandfather, Alexander, with an iron bar during an argument, with Alexander being badly hurt and dying a few days later. James was an iron worker by trade in Scotland and continued this trade in the small town of Sorell in Tasmania. We cannot know much about the life he led in Sorell, but he is mentioned in a variety of documents. For example we know he was given a Free Pardon by the Governor of Tasmania and New South Wales in 1836. He also acquired some land in 1839, which, in his Will, he left to daughters of a friend. We know his affection for 'drink', which had led to the fatal fight back in Scotland, never left him as 'excessive drinking' was given as cause of death on his death certificate. However his tombstone bears witness to the fact he was well-liked and a 'good and h

2024 Week 14: Favourite recipe #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

So, despite the heading, I'm not going to write about a favourite recipe that an ancestor has passed down to me, simply because there isn't one. What or rather whom I'm going to write about is my mum, Helen Anderson, who absolutely loved baking. And it is this love of baking that has been passed on to me. My mum. My mum was always baking. Like most children, I got allowed to 'lick the spoon' and taste the raw cake mixture. I got to learn to how to make crispie cakes. I watched how to make pancakes and enjoyed getting the first ones off the pan. I took in helpful baking hints like 'half fat to flour' for pastry or ' 4 4 4 plus 2' for the measurements of flour, sugar, butter and eggs needed for a sponge cake or little butterfly cakes. She had learned how to bake from her mother, as many women in her generation had done. There was always something 'in the tin' should a friend or neighbour pop in for a cup of tea. But she didn't just bake f

2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot

Roots, shoots and stories

Search This Blog