Family history

  19/52 Food and Drink: Annie Eliza Prince, 1884 -1967 I run in the back door and head for the bottom shelf of the cupboard to find a silver plated engraved biscuit barrel. It is round with a hinged lid and a handle. Inside are short bread biscuits.   Christmas dinners at grandma’s, a long table. Roast - probably beef, Yorkshire pudding. And then Christmas pudding and mince pies, dusted with icing sugar. There are threepences and sixpences in the pudding of course but one year I don’t get one and my bowl is whisked away and returned, sixpence in place!   Grandma, Annie Eliza Prince, was born in 1884 in Liverpool. Her baptism certificate says she was living at Crown Street and that her father was an ‘osler’, yet another occupation for James Prince who has been listed as a ‘fire work maker’   butcher,   coachman,   ‘gun powder maker’ and   horse keeper. Perhaps an Osler is the same as a coachman or horse keeper.   Crown Street was the location of th...

Social Margery Rebecca Godlee I have struggled with ‘Social’. My grandmother, who we called ‘Dari’, was indeed ‘social’ in every sense of the word. It’s just that ‘social’ sounds somehow shallow and she wasn’t that. She was deep. I loved her very much and I think that made it hard to write about her life too. But here it is.   Marge and Bill had known each other since childhood. When she was 12 her brother wrote :   I’m surprised to hear that even a level headed parson’s son’s head was turned at the sight of your etherial (?) beauty and that he wanted to kiss you the first time he saw you. I recon that’s going the pace alright if you don’t.   In 1914, when she was 17, they got engaged. Margery Rebecca was the third child of Charlotte and Theodore Godlee and was born in 1895, the same year that women in South Australia won the vote. After this her mother had another three girls and two boys. When Marge was   12 in 1908, her father died from pneumonia and then, in 1910...

  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...

  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.   ...