Family history

  32/52 Library: Mabel Joyce Godlee 1903 -1998 ‘Mabel Joyce’ was never known as Mabel; in fact she is said to have hated that name. People called her Joyce, but she was Jay to family.   She lived to be a very old woman, in a nursing home.  A   librarian from the Burnside Library would visit the home regularly to bring her books. She had a keen mind, open to learning, until she died. The librarian got to know what she liked, serious literature, and provided it.   I realise now that Jay was probably smarter than I knew. Her favourite author was Thomas Mann, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.   His 1921 novel, Magic Mountain was set in a sanitarium in Switzerland where in the 1930s Jay would   find herself working as a nurse.   Mann was a German intellectual who had to flee Germany during the war. In America he suffered under McCarthyism. Jay was a serious reader all her life and as a result, she was a progressive thinker. She was one of the first in the family of her g

 31 /52 Help. Sarah Godlee, 1798 -1866 I did a search for Godlee and Rickman in the British Archives before I left Tasmania. I found quite a lot at the East Sussex Record Office. I had to register and put in a request for the documents that interested me. That was all done before I left home. I had also been advised by my 5th Best cousin to make sure I could charge my phone if it went flat taking too many photos.   In June 2019 I went to Lewes, going to the opera at Glyndbourne,   exploring the ruins of the Lewes Priory, taking snaps of the White Hart where Thomas Paine met with the Headstrong Club, checking out the ancestral sacred sites: the Quaker Meeting House and the streets in the Cliffe where the Godlees lived. Eventually I caught the train to The Keep, the purpose built Records Office,   which is half way between Lewes and Brighton. It looks like a castle keep and I enjoyed the play on words. Records are kept there.   It was a hot walk from the railway station, following along

  28/52 Character: Dinah Hussey :1801 - 1876 Dinah Hussey had character. She was my three times great grandmother. Her daughter, Rebekah Harris was the mother of Charlotte Hobbs, my grandmother’s mother, all four generations, women of tremendous character. In particular Dinah, pregnant, brought her five children under twelve by sea to the colony of South Australia. giving birth to her sixth child at sea. She and her husband built a market gardening business and a successful life in the colony. This is what I know. Dinah was born in the depth of winter in December 1801 in Halberton, Devon. It must have been a beautiful place. The beauty of Devon was passed down in family stories so that when Norah Godlee travelled there in Spring in 1926 her mother, Dinah’s granddaughter, reminds Norah how her grandmother, (Dinah’s daughter who had left Devon when she was 5 years old,)   ’…. delighted in Devon. She told me just the same about the lanes, the ferns and foxgloves. Oh, it must be enthrallin