Family history

  23/52 Popular Name: Mabel Hunt.  1876 - 1969 Mabel was a popular name in 1876. In Victoria alone, that year, a simple search in TROVE brings up over 300 entries. In 2002 there were 11, most of them Funeral notices for a grandma Mabel who is sadly missed. I never had a friend or acquaintance called Mabel and today no one I know calls their daughter Mabel. I hear that my friend, Sue, (a popular name of the 50s!), has a grandchild named Mabel, so it may be about to experience a revival. My grandfather, Mabel Hunt’s nephew, called her Auntie Mab, so probably that’s how she was referred to in the family. There are other now dated names in this family including Ernest, Edith, Winifred, Herbert, Harold, Arthur, Ethel and Gertrude, all names that were popular in the 1870s and 80s. Auntie Mab was the daughter of Elizabeth née Best and William Hunt. Elizabeth, the daughter of a Primitive Methodist preacher from Dorset, married William, a Wiltshire Primitive Methodist minister. With t...

  22/52 Mistake: Edith Frances Jackson; 1867 - 1900. When I first started exploring my family history my father’s family, the Jacksons were one of the first families I investigated because I knew so little about them. My Jackson grandfather was dead before I was born and so I didn’t know him at all and my dad didn’t talk about his family. This grandfather was the subject of my first Family History Diploma subject, Introduction to Family History.   Here I learned about using Ancestry and I subscribed because when the subject was over, I could’t live without it. Ancestry was a great gift. Among other things - like other people’s family trees - I was able to access the British Census and could follow the family over ten year intervals from 1841.   Here I learned that my grandfather was the youngest of a big tribe of sisters, my great aunts, who I had never heard of: Louisa, Edith, Florence, Emily and Gertrude. I was able to follow them from Hull, the birthplace of Louisa, Ed...

Conflict: Mary Wibberley 1921  -  2014  I begin with trepidation. If only I had been able to find a woman ancestor who had been involved in a war. But so far as I know, they kept the home fires burning, knitted socks and wrote letters to their lovers and brothers at war.   My mother, Mary Wibberley, experienced conflict in her marriage to my father. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t the only woman ancestor in the family to have that experience. In her case though, there was a separation and a divorce and I was in the thick of it. It couldn’t be shoved under the carpet. She probably would have preferred to have done this but it became impossible.   Hermia Mary Wibberley was born in May, 1921 in the farming/fishing village of Tumby Bay. Her name ‘Hermia’ was a reference to Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the Sparknotes study guide to this play it says:   Hermia is one of the strongest female characters in the play. She passionately rejects male authority figures in ord...

  20/52: Textile: Grace Jackson After my father’s sister, Datie, died, the cousins gathered at Fommie’s place and sorted through her effects, choosing the pieces we each wanted. One of the pieces that came to me was a book of lace knitting patterns. This book became important in my knitting life. When I first started working as a high school teacher, I suffered from insomnia and I needed a hobby that engrossed my mind in a meditative way, and the lace knitting book fitted the bill perfectly. I had to concentrate meticulously on each stitch, each row. If my mind wandered I would make a mistake. Curiously some years after this i was visiting my mother’s sister, Judy, in Adelaide. I had the lace knitting book with me and Judy had some visitors for dinner. They recognised this book because it was they who had given the book to Datie. It was an amazing cooincidence.   I start this blog with a great sense of inadequacy. I do not know enough about Grace Jackson - Datie. I know that m...

  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...