Skip to main content

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.



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
4 comments
Read more

2024 Week 19: Preserve #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

 A few years ago, I came into the possession of a family bible. It was the family bible of my paternal grandparents, John McAra and Christina Walker. Until her death in 2018, the bible had been in the hands of my Aunt Inez, widow of my Uncle Will McAra. When I started enquiring as to its whereabouts, I found that it was her grandson, John, who now had it. John himself had no real interest in it at all, so he was quite happy to hand it over to me. However, it was, to say the least, in a bit of a state. The front cover was completely detached and there were many loose pages as the spine of the book was also damaged and detached. I had no choice but to take it to a book repairer in Glasgow, where it was repaired as best it could be. The bible itself had been originally published in Glasgow in the late 19th century. In Victorian times it was common for Christian families to have such a large bible in which they could record events such as births, marriages and deaths. The one I have al...
1 comment
Read more

2024: Week 41: Most #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however,  the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...
Post a Comment
Read more