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.

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