Family history

 26/11/22 Here is Day 2. Yay! I showed up again.  This is glasses cleaning spray bottle next to my chair where I read every morning. It is somewhat similar to the yogurt pot of yesterday's drawing. I think I see a small improvement already in getting it a little more symmetrical. Both bottle and pot have the same complicated layers of plastic rings along the top. This had the added challenge of trying to depict the liquid in the bottle. I don't think I captured that very well.  But the main thing is, here I am again. Success! By the end of the week I would like to try some interiors of the living room. But One Day At a Time. 

  25/11/22 This is Day 1 of the Daily drawing project.  My plan is to draw 5 minutes - 10 minutes every day for 30 days. Each week I will start in a different room in the house. This is a yogurt container which is on the table in the living room, next to my chair. Tony uses it for shelling walnuts but now it is filled with Italian playing cards and other junk that is on his table. I am going to draw in the living room this week.  I am pretty unhappy with my first sketch but the plan is to assess my success on my regularity of turning up and not the quality of my drawings.  I know from past experience that when you start to draw after a long break, you are overwhelmed with the 'I can't draw' feelings. I know practice improves it.  I am reluctant to share this bad drawing, but apparently it helps motivation to share. So here you go! My first drawing. I have made a start. This will take me up to Christmas. 

  35/52: Free Space: Maria Nightingale. When I was a teenager, in the 1960s, if an unmarried girl got pregnant she had a very bad time. My mother had a friend who had two nieces in Melbourne who experienced this. They came to spend their pregnancies in Adelaide at the Kate Cox Home and my mother used to bring them out to our place at weekends and support them in other ways.   I was told that this was top secret. They had told their friends in Melbourne that they had gone to work in Adelaide and no one was allowed to know the truth. Never Ever! I often wonder if they have since told their husbands and children or even connected with the babies who were of course given away for adoption immediately . I also had a friend who this happened to. She hardly got to see her son, let alone hold him. It was all dreadful. I myself got pregnant when I was 19 and had an abortion which was an experience of gut wrenching grief but I couldn’t have gone through with the adoption procedure.   We also rea

  34: Timeline: Florence Annie Jackson; 1870 -1949 Most of my blogs have been timelines, beginning with the birth and ending with the death of the subject. So this one is more of the same. I have chosen my great aunt Florrie because it is time to do another of the Jackson great aunts. How I regret that I never even knew of their existence. Their little brother, my grandfather, migrated to Australia in 1914 and died in 1951 the year before I was born. My father never spoke about his English aunts, although I understand my grandmother send Christmas cakes to them.   Florence was the third child of Francis Jackson and Annie Eliza née Jackson,   https://sowheel.blogspot.com/2022/02/652-maps-annie-eliza-jackson.html cousins who married. She was born in 1870 in Hull, joining Louisa https://sowheel.blogspot.com/2022/10/3052-team-louisa-kate-jackson-1862-1949.html and Edith - https://sowheel.blogspot.com/2022/06/2252-mistake-edith-frances-jackson-1867.html So the first date on our Time line

     This picture from 1916 shows Lottie on the left. At the back, from left to right are” Charlotte, Dots,    and the other Godlee children at the College Park home.      33/52 Service: Charlotte Lucy Godlee, 1854 - 1935 The first time Lottie is mentioned in a letter is in 1867, from Mary Anne Godlee to her sister-in-law, Mary Amelia née Guy.   I am pleased to to avail myself of this opportunity to send thee, thy sister Charlotte, and dear little Charlotte Lucy, each a print dress, as it will probably be warm weather when it arrives. Charlotte Lucy was 13 years old when that print dress was made for her, not so little. At the start of that year her father had been declared insolvent.   This trouble is referred to in the letter when Mary Anne says :     I long to hear more about you,   and if the past troubles are succeeded by happier times…….. I think very very often of you and aspirations are frequently raised to the throne of grace that through this much tribulation we may all reach

  30/52 Teams: Louisa Kate Jackson, 1862 -1949.   Before supermarkets there were grocery shops. Like Hill Street Grocery shops in Tasmania today, they were often family businesses. As well as grocery items, they extended to hardware and drapery, mens and women’s clothing, haberdashery, as Wells in Latrobe still does today. My great aunt Louisa Jackson was a member of such a family business. You could say the Jacksons were a team. They included parents, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, in-laws, cousins, nieces and nephews. They looked after one another and helped out in the several shops in Sheffield. As you read through the English census you can see the development of the family   and the businesses, starting in 1851 when Francis Jackson was a 15 year old grocer’s apprentice. By 1861 he was a tea dealer and was making enough money to marry.   Tea from China had started off being a drink of the upper classes but by the middle of the 19th century it had taken off in the working c