Family history

  27/52 Extended family As my whole blog includes the extended family, I’m not sure how to make this blog more extended or more family.   I want a 2nd cousin once-removed   or something like that.   My choice is Irene Gwendoline Best. I have chosen her because it is good to know I have cousin called Gwendoline, even if it is a second name. She was a teacher too so we have something in common.   Elizabeth Best was the subject of last week’s blog. She had a brother called John Humphries Best. His daughter, Irene Gwendoline was the first cousin of Elizabeth’s daughter   - Maria Hunt.   So Maria’s son, Grandpa Brian (aka Bill) Wibberley was the 1st cousin once-removed of Irene Gwendoline. My mother was Irene Gwendoline’s first cousin twice-removed and I am her first cousin three times-removed. A third time removed cousin is three generations distant:   1. my mum, 2. my grandpa, 3. my great grandmother - who was the cousin of Irene Gwendoline Best. Now that we’ve sorted that out, let me pro

  25/52 Identity : Elizabeth Best This coffee cup is said to have come to me from the Hunt family. Could it have belonged to Elizabeth?  Elizabeth and Ezra, twins, were the first children of Anna Maria Humphries and Joseph Best. Joseph was converted to Primitive Methodism as a young man. He was musical, joined a band which took him into bad company. He saw the Light at the age of 21 and started distributing tracts, soon leaving his agricultural village, Durweston in Dorset and becoming an itinerant preacher. In 1844 he married Anna Maria Humphries who was from a Primitive Methodist family. She was 20, he was 31. Two years later with the baby twins he was posted in St Ives, Cornwall as a superintendent. Although women played an important role in the Primitive Methodist church, that being something that distinguished them from Wesleyan Methodists, by 1844 this had been reigned in, especially for married women. So I can’t see Anna Maria with her twins, ministering to the assembled crowds

 24/52 Broken Branch: Maria Ann Hunt.(1867 -1935) For the ‘broken branch’ I will write about Maria Hunt, because Maria was broken in as far as she suffered from chronic illness most of her adult life. My family history research is also broken because I have no idea what her illness was. The nature of it was unmentionable, perhaps not an uncommon problem in researching women’s history.   Maria Ann Hunt was born in 1867 in Wiltshire. She was named after her grandmother, Anna Maria née Humphries who had died  when Maria’s mother, Elizabeth née Best, was eleven. Maria’s newly married parents, Elizabeth and William Hunt, both raised in Primitive Methodism, set sail for the colony of Victoria soon after Maria was born. They arrived in Melbourne in December and set off for William’s first posting as a Primitive Methodist minister in Clunes. Over the next 17 years Elizabeth raised five more children: Edith, (1870), Herbert (1872), Mabel (1876), Harold (1880) and Ethel (1884). The family moved