Family history

  17/52 Document. Ann Harris. Ann Harris was the daughter of a school teacher in Reading. Her birth date is unknown. She was my fourth great grandmother, married to my fourth great grandfather, Thomas Godlee.   The main document I rely on to write her story is the memories of their son, dictated to his daughter, Sarah, their grand daughter. The copy I had was not the one Sarah wrote down. That one was copied out again by one of her sisters and sent to a brother in Australia, where it was copied again, and given to his daughter, my great aunts’ aunt. Eventually it came to my mother and then to me. This is my most precious family history document. It weighed heavily on me. What if the house burned down and I lost it? I transcribed it and donated it to a library so now it is safe and available on line.   Since Ancestry I have been able to access other documents to confirm these stories but the first source is the Recollections of Early Life of John Godlee. When Thomas Godlee, John Godlee’

  16/52 Negative: Mary Rickman   This week’s prompt is ‘Negative’. It was difficult to choose an ancestor to ascribe as ‘negative’ but I have chosen Mary Rickman, my third great grandmother, partly on the strength of this silhouette portrait of her, which is reminiscent of a photographic negative.   Other negatives were events in her life and her attitude to her son, my second great grandfather, John, the member of this family who broke away and formed the Australian branch.   She was born in 1770, a handy date because it is easy to tell her age at any other date. And, for an Australian, a memorable date because in April that year, as she lay cradled in her mother’s arms, James Cook first saw the east coast of Australia. So much happened from that but Mary Rickman would never have imagined how it might connect with her.   She was born in Lewes, Sussex, into a solid eighteenth century Quaker family who had   lived as Quakers around Lewes since 1700.   In David  Hitchin's ,   Q uak

 15/52 ;  How do you spell that? Jane Prince This great aunt was a steady presence in my life until I was 36. We called her Aunty Ginny. Many years later when I started investigating my family history, researching my paternal grandmother’s family, the Princes, I couldn’t find anyone called ‘Ginny’. I soon realised that Ginny was Jane, or Janie. Our Australian ears heard ‘Ginny’ in the Liverpudlian accent. I never saw her name written down. It astounds me thatI didn’t even know her name, someone I had known for so long!   When I came to write this blog I only knew family stories. There weren’t any documents. My cousin told me he had recorded an interview with her and had it on a cassette. But he didn’t know where it was and how do you deal with a cassette now? My mother’s sister said she wished my mother were still alive because she knew stuff. And of course, my dad, as, after all, Auntie Ginny was his aunt. So this blog has led me to search out the truth of some family legends. What wa

  I said I wasn’t going to do any more 52 Ancestor blogs for a while and concentrate on transcribing letters. That didn’t last long! In the letters from my great aunt, Norah Godlee , I found something I had to check out!   In the summer of 1926 Norah was in England. She followed up her father’s cousins and one of them was Cousin Juliet.   Juliet née Seebohm was the granddaughter of Benjamin Seebohm who was born in Friedenstal, Germany, a member of a German Quaker community that was visited by Elizabeth Fry. This Benjamin migrated to England and married Esther Wheeler - another Quaker name of repute. Their second son was Juliet’s father. He was a barrister and although mentioned in the census as a banker, became famous as an economic historian. He was Juliet’s father and the great grandfather of Victoria (née Seebohm,) Glendinning.  Juliet was Victoria's great aunt.  Juliet   grew up in Hitchen, Herefordshire. They were well off. In the 1861 census when she was two, they had five se