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General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: Springbok on Sunday 04 December 05 15:08 GMT (UK)
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My husbands Gran was born in 1856 and I met her when she was 97, still as bright as a button.
Her tales of bringing up 9 daughters in London were fascinating but the most vivid to me were of going to the Fulham street Market on a Saturday night where the street was lit with Naptha flares. The girls with a penny to buy last minute bargains. the last pieces of scrag end of lamb,or whatever meat was going. She would go for the Veg. and sometimes find a boiler Chicken if she was lucky.
Christmas didn't seem to be celebrated in the mid 1850's
as most factory workers didn't appear to have a day off.
Her husband seemed to have tried many jobs,a bit of market gardening in Hounslow where he'd go by Carrier at 3a.m to sell at Covent Garden. Tried running The Railway (Tavern?Inn?) at Whittlesford(Nr.Duxford) but what she hinted ,it didn't work out. Unusually all the girls survived and Gran lived to be 99.
Springbok
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The furthest I can go is my grandad who was born in 1899 - I have copies of his diaries which take you back to his memories of his boyhood in the early 1900s around the Elephant and Castle.
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My great grandfather must have remembered back to 1860 but I can only remember that he smelt funny and I didn't like sitting on his knee.
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I have my grandfather's written recollections of his youth in rural Wisconsin, 1874-1900.
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I have wonderful memories of my Nan's brother, Bill - it was only when I started researching the family tree that I realise that he was born not in the last century but the one before, in 1898!
My other Nan is still alive and is now 92 - she has the best memory and can remember all names, addresses and lots of gossip! Must get to chat with her about her side of the family soon.
Sue B
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Hello there,
My father was born in 1896 and so was a Victorian! He was 30yrs older than my mother, & sadly died when we were all young children. He had travelled all over the world as a Merchant Seaman & then served in the RNVR during WW1; being badly wounded in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. How I wish that I had been able to talk to him about his life...
I remember that my mother used to have a book of pressed flowers that my father had collected for his mother. It was entitled, "Flowers from the Holy Land", & had flowers that my father had picked & pressed in what was then Trans-Jordan and Palestine. My mother says that she can't remember what happened to it.
My father's elder brother was born in 1894, & lived until 1974, & so I was able to talk to him. How I wish now that I had taped some of his memories about his family & his life! He was also in the Merchant Navy & had visited pre-revolutionary Russia many times. He told me that he had once given a droshky, (horse drawn carriage) driver his silk scarf in lieu of payment, & was then visited by the Tsarist police & told off about it. He was a fund of knowledge in all sorts of areas, & really brought history to life for me.
Sorry to have rambled on:-)
All Best Wishes, Romilly.
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Romilly, Thankyou, That was the sort of Memory I was hoping for when I started this thread.
I'd loved to know what sort of things were written in the Diaries mentioned,Wisconsin must have been so differant to the Elephant and Castle!!
And Sue B. see your Nan and see what it was like at school and growing up.. Don't leave it too late
Springbok
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My grandfather wrote about a hundred pages on rural life in central Wisconsin during the late 1800s - crops, animals, wildlife, farm labor and machinery, the coming of the railroads, river transport, logging, Indian encampments, etc. He told of his education in one room schools and later, after the family had moved into town (7 houses), high school at an "academy" started by members of my grandmother's family. He described summer work on a railroad "section gang" and assisting on a geological survey and an archaeological survey of Indian mounds.
He described many family members, friends, neighbors, and local characters (including a number of English and Irish immigrants) so if anyone has relatives from Douglas, Buffalo, or Moundville, Marquette County, Wisconsin, let me know - he may have commented on them.
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How I'm envious of you all after reading all those memories.
My eldest relative was my gt gran , born in 1898 and died aged 102 but refused point blank to tell anything about her early days, if she had something to hide I haven't found it yet ;)
Bee
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Just wish that I had asked more recent relatives Bee.
Erato, you have just reminded me of an elderly retired Gentleman we visited in the 1970's whilst we lived in Northern Spain.
He owned some very early N.American Maps (c. 1600's) these were proper surveyors maps. Great areas of White 'Unexplored' lots of notations such as 'Friendly Indians', 'Good Water here' and also showed the wagon trails.
He had 5 or 6 of these from the earliest to about 1750. I've looked on lots of US sites but can find nothing like them. Always hope that he left them to be preserved.
Springbok
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Speaking of maps, for anyone with relatives in Wisconsin, the original land survey notes and plat maps (about 1830-50) have been scanned and can be found at:
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/SurveyNotes/
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Much of the memories of the Elephant and Castle was about ways a young boy could earn money - catching birds on the Hackney marshes to be sold at The Cut Market at Waterloo, running errands, collecting the programmes from the first house of the local music hall and selling them to the second house. It also covers the death of his sister aged about 5 - she set her hair alight on the candles of the Christmas tree and died as a result and the death of a brother who was run over by a tram - his mother died of a heart attack soon after the latter event - worn out by the stress to quote my grandfather. Life was tough!
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Much of the memories of the Elephant and Castle was about ways of a young boy could earn money - catching birds on the Hackney marshes to be sold at The Cut Market at Waterloo, running errands, collecting the programmes from the first house pf the local music hall and selling them to the second house. It also covers the death of his sister aged about 5 - she set her hair alight on the candles of the Christmas tree and died as a result and the death of a brother who was run over by a tram - his mother died of a heart attack soon after the latter event - worn out by the stress to quote my grandfather. Life was tough!
Thankyou for those extracts. ggrocott,
Yes life was really tough, How wonderful to know such details though. Apart obtaining all their Certs. of Death how would have anyone have known how those poor children died.
And how your Granddad raised extra pennies. Just loved the reselling of the programmes.
Springbok
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I remember meeting an old soldier in the sixties who joined up in the Zulu wars as a boy and finished in 1940.
No he was not Jones the Butcher ;D
Cheers Dave
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My grandfather, who lived with us, was born in 1876. Often, usually after Sunday dinner, he would settle down and say "did I ever tell you....?" and even if we all said "yes" he'd carry on with his tale. He had been in the Boer War and some of his tales were about that - not the fighting etc. but the big adventure of leaving Yorkshire for the first time in his life, going on a ship for the first time and mixing with foreigners (ie Lancastrians!) for the first time. They were usually funny like his friend, who after weeks on the ship, had spotted a fly as they were approaching Capetown and had informed everyone that he'd seen "an English fly" because he didn't know they lived in foreign parts as well. He told us about his horse, which he'd had throughout, being shot from under him and how the only thing he could do was put it out of its misery. His weren't the only eyes with tears in when he told this one.
He volunteered for WWI but failed the medical because they thought he had a heart murmur but he had the last laugh because he was 92 years when he died in 1968.
He also used to reminisce about his family and the amusing things they'd got up to. Unfortunately, except for one brother they had all been dead for ages by this time and I suppose because I never knew them, I didn't pay much attention. I'll leave you to guess how many times since I've bitterly regretted this stupidity!!!
Jud
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I don't have any great personal items, but about 15 years ago I knew a woman who well remembered her own grandmother, who had been born a slave in the USA, before the Civil War. I remember being quite stunned as she told me this, just looking at her, with her unusually dark skin (very dark, even for a black American) and trying to imagine what this must have been like, being close to someone who had grown up a slave. (I am white.) She often cited her grandma's wisdom and advice, none of which I can remember now unfortunately.
For myself, I always knew that I had a greataunt who had been a fashion designer in the 1920s and onwards, although I'd never met her and no one seemed to know anything about her after about 1935. I assumed she'd probably died a long time ago. Very much to my chagrin, I learned through my research, a couple of months ago, that she lived to be almost 96, and only died 10 years ago. I would have loved to have met her. If only I'd known...
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And Sue B. see your Nan and see what it was like at school and growing up.. Don't leave it too late
Springbok
My Nan has told me stories of the Chip man from when she was young - A horse and cart pulled a wagon through the streets of Cheltenham (approx 1920) with a large pot of boiling fat, heated by a wood fire, and chips were cooked in the fat. Just imagine what could have happened if the fat caught fire or the horse bolted. I think the Health and Saftey inspecters would have a field day now!
The only trouble is that I have heard this story about a hundred times now - so the novelty is wearing off !!!
Sue B
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OK, let's up the challenge insofar as years go.
Ggma was b 1854 in Victoria, Aus. I believe I met her! Though I only have a dim memory of an ancient lady sitting in a chair in a darkened room.
But I certainly knew Grandpa very well. He was b 1855 in Victoria, Aus. He died in 1949. Unfortunately, being a man of his generation, he was not remotely interested in talking to a prissy little school girl. And a prissy little schoolgirl, while she would undoubtedly have been interested in his stories, wasn't about to force herself onto a scruffy old deaf (mostly a pretence) ancient Grandpa who, to her mortification, walked down the street dressed in trousers with braces, a grandpa shirt, and dirty runners! He used to visit us after walking several miles from his home. And a couple of days before he died in his 90s he dug a hole in his backyard to bury some rubbish!
Grandpa had a great history, I now find; apparently as a little tacker he wrote letters home to Ireland for illiterate immigrants, he started the first Shearers' Union (in Longford Tasmania); he was pivotal in starting the ASU in the 1870s; he worked in the Rutherglen goldmines with a chap who later became PM of New Zealand, etc, etc. Gpa was also a lightning calculator (could tell you how many seconds you'd lived - well if you knew the exact second you'd been born) and gave demos especially in WW2 to the troops. If only I had the scrapbooks he kept - conned out of my Gma by a well-known author ...
Some years after Gpa's death I met a (younger) friend of his - who had lived up in Ned Kelly country. Donald McDonald told me that the Kelly boys were total larrikins but Mrs K and her daughter were very nice ladies!
Come on guys! Who actually knew someone born before 1854/1855!
JAP
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A well thrown Gauntlet, Jap,
What a wonderful character your ggranpa sounds, but then,they all were,to survive those early conditions
I have family in NZ and to go round some of the settler museums with their old photos is an education:especially many women working alongside the menfolk mining and bringing up their rafts of children
I was about to change the heading for this thread to ask for "Any tales from the past," but reckon it's doing quite well folks. Keep 'em coming please
Springbok
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Springbok, I'm sorry about the gauntlet and just (only just) pipping you on the year front. And he wasn't my Ggpa - he was my Gpa! ::) I just wish that Grandpa had talked to me as your husband's Gran did to you about her wonderful memoriesl Though his memories wouldn't have meant as much as they would have been about 'boring' local places.
While, unfortunately, I don't have Grandpa's scrapbooks, I do have articles written by his brother Charlie (#1 ticketholder of the Wagga Wagga Shearers' Union) in 1936 in the Australian Worker on the 50th anniversary of the AWU (the AWU - Australian Workers Union - was derived from the ASU - Australian Shearers Union; yes I quoted the wrong decade in my earlier post). Life was harsh in those early shearing sheds. Charlie wrote, inter alia, of some squatters giving them forks made from twisted fencing wire! But that wasn't all of the story; Charlie wrote too of the joys of nature and compared his early days - when he and his older brother, my Granpa AJ, went to their first shearing job as teenage lads in the 1870s - with Trollope's dedscription of life in Oz as one long picnic.
Let's hope someone comes along and pips me!
But, as the stories on this thread show, there are just so many wonderful stories and memories out there. So let's forget about the year and bring on the stories.
JAP
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No Probs.Jap That's what I hoped in the beginning /Bit of a challenge and lots of interesting things where we have to use a lot of imagination to envisage.
Just remembered Sue B, the Bread man who used have a box (shaped like an old Sedan Chair) with shafts in front and which he used to pull around the streets.Only a tiny,wiry man ,I always wondered how the weight of the bread didn't have him dangling in the Air One day he let me try and although I manged to get the shafts down,it took all my strength to keep them down, let alone pull the box.
Springbok
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My grandfather passed on a story from his grandfather, one of the first settlers in Marquette County. In their first year in the log cabin, gg grandma had a yen for bread so gg grandpa walked 40 miles to the nearest town to buy flour. He bought a 50 lb sack and a pint of whiskey. He poured the whiskey in his boots to disinfect his blisters and carried the flour home on his shoulders. As my grandfather said, "B.H. was a lifelong teetotaller."
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My mother (who is alive and relatively well at 85) remembers her grandmother well.
This is Ann Lee who married 1) William Aldous 2) Edward Jackson
She was born in 1848 in Upperthong near Holmfirth.
Her father was a cordwainer (shoemaker)
She related how she walked across the moors delivering shoes.
If it was cold she would have a hot potato in her muff.
I'm not sure if the moors were in yorkshire or Derbyshire, as the family had moved to Glossop by 1861. It could be this was in response to the Holmfirth floods of 1852.
She had an eventful life, marying twice.
My mother's father was born in 1898 when she was forty in her second marriage.
In later years when they lived in Littleton, Sheppterton, Middlesex near the film studios, minor films stars would lodge with them.
She lived until 1940, the first of three deaths in the household in a few months
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bee,let us all know if you do
or
maybe we could help
sylvia
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Can't go back as far some folk but my grandparents were both born in 1875 and I almost lived in their pockets but sadly I wasn't interested in family history in those days but my mother in law was born 1895 and didn't die until she was 97. She had a wonderful memory and gave names and dates which have all turned out spot on and told stories of her father born 1867 but even so never got round to asking all the right questions.
Kissimmee
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My grandmothers cousin Hilda Downton is aged 104 born in 1901 I met her through doing my family history earlier this year. have attached pic of our meeting. I remember my Gr Grandmother who was born in 1883 and died in 1980, She would often tell me about her time in India as she was their with my Gr Grandfather and spend about 10 years their living a lavish life She used to love telling her stories and they used to sound good wish i had taped these as some of this would have been very usefull to my family history. I wish i had started when she was still alive hence i did not start anything for many years My other Gr Grandmother born in 1879 and died in 1978 She lived in chichester but i did not see her so much about once a year did not tell me anything about her early years but she was still working aged 97 and was presented the cbm for being Britain's oldest working woman. PS Both of my Gr Grandmothers smoked Jim
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Jim,
Thank you for sharing the fantastic photo - what interesting lives your people led. I can't believe that your beautiful cousin is as old as you say she is! It's a lovely Xmas present to read your message and to see such a delightful photo.
All the best for your Xmas day (ours is close to finishing - just after 11pm here).
JAP
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I am now 81. My great uncle Walter was born in 1850 and lived to 99 (1949). His sons were very cross because they were busy planning his hundredth birthday celebrations. I can't remember him talking about his early days but he was born in the City of London according to the 1851 census and became a cabinet maker, later having his own business as a piano case maker. He went to his factory in St.Pancras every day till some time in 1940 (age 89 or 90), but had a slight accident getting on a bus in the wartime blackout. His doctor told him he shouldn't go out after dark. "Blow that " he said, "I'd have to leave work half way through the afternoon - I'd better leave the boys (his Sons ) to do what they can." The boys were all in their 60s! ;D
Evans - London and Midx.
Gamon - Shoreditch
Putman - Northchurch, Herts and Harefield, Middx
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Hello Barbajan,
Wow 81!, you must be one of the oldest members on Rootschat, and a vast knowledge of how times have changed since you were a child.
Welcome to Rootschat :) :)
Bee
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I am now 81. My great uncle Walter was born in 1850 and lived to 99 (1949). His sons were very cross because they were busy planning his hundredth birthday celebrations. I can't remember him talking about his early days but he was born in the City of London according to the 1851 census and became a cabinet maker, later having his own business as a piano case maker. He went to his factory in St.Pancras every day till some time in 1940 (age 89 or 90), but had a slight accident getting on a bus in the wartime blackout. His doctor told him he shouldn't go out after dark. "Blow that " he said, "I'd have to leave work half way through the afternoon - I'd better leave the boys (his Sons ) to do what they can." The boys were all in their 60s! ;D
Hello Barbajan,
Thanks for sharing that with us. Your Great Uncle sounds a great character!
All Best Wishes, Romilly. :)
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Hi Barbajan,
I had to laugh at 'The boys' being cross. The Gran who I started this thread with, didn't want to live to 100, only to equal an Aunt of her own who lived to be 99.
And true, that her daughters were bemoaning the fact that she 'Hadn't made it'(to 100)
Her last few days in that Victorian hangover of the old West Middx Hosp. were not to her liking "Don't like it here,It's full of Old People"!!
Springbok
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I would also like to say welcome to Barbajan. What a good new subject for the lighter side - 'Who is our oldest Rootschat member'
Kissimmee
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the oldest person in my family i've met is my 80 year old paternal great aunt joyce, born 1925 - all my great grandparents were dead by 1981 and most of their siblings were also dead by the time i was born in 1986. There are a few of my grandparent's brothers and sisters still alive, who were all born in the 1925-1935 years.
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My Mum was lucky enough to have known her great-grandmother. Sadly mum died many years ago, but a great friend of hers is still alive, now in her late 80's (and also now my step mum, as she married my dad after my mum's death, but that is beside the point!). My step mum can also remember my Mum's great grandmother. She also knew my mum's grandmother, her mother, my mum (of course), me and my brothers, our children, and has just spent Christmas visiting my brother, his children and his grandchildren! (i.e would be my Mum's great grandchildren)
So this dear old lady has known 7 generations of my family.
I am sure this must be a record!
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The furthest I can go back is my granddad Billy born 1878. He was quite a character and "lady's man".
He married twice having five children with his first wife and four with his second (my line).
He died in 1963 and I remember his sisters, both in their nineties, crying and saying he had died so young, 85, because of his wild womanising ways.
He was only 5' 2" and never had to go to war because he was excused for being too short. He was definitely a bantom cock and would out drink and outfight any challengers.
He lived through desperate poverty and told me there were times when he had walked to length of Macclesfield canal looking for watercress and herbs to put on bread as that was all they had to eat.
He had lived his life pretty much as he wanted when married to his first wife but his second wife, my grandmother, was a bit of a shock, she put a stop to his drinking and once knocked him senseless for coming home drunk. He behaved himself for the rest of his married life but when she died in 1940 he got legless at her funeral.
He staggered upstairs to bed and swore blind for the rest of his life that she had come out of the bedroom and thrown him down the stairs for being intoxicated. He never went up the stairs again and had his bed moved into the dining room where it stayed until he died in 1963. ;D
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I have a second person in my tree, but in this case there are no mempories.
My Anut on my father's side, born 1917, can just remember great uncle Archibald, who was born in 1844.
He never married and I recently found him mentioned in the Times 1870's, a womens he employed tried to deceive him and another person in Egham, there was a trial at Southwark.
My grandmother remembered him as a handsome man, but it's ratrher sad, that he never really settled, or married, and so was vulnerable to this sort of thing.
Bob
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I guess I'm lucky !
I was over in Dunoon yesterday visiting my 83 yr old aunt and my own mother who is 93. They share a flat and still fight , as sisters do, over who has the story correct. Asking questions about something that happened 50, 60, 70 years ago does not always get a straightforward answer but it triggers lots of reminisinces which invariably produce a gem or two that I have not heard before.
Yesterday produced not only a few more clues... I also fell heir to a photo album going back to her time in America during Prohibition. She has similar albums for my brother and sister so I must knobble them before they cart them off. One to the wilds of Derbyshire; the other to a Scottish island that needs a ferry ride to reach (Luing off the west coast - -pronounced LING for the uninitiated). Beautiful but distant and I live on the west coast!.
I hope I have access to her memories for a long time !!!
She still does country dancing at 93. I get puffed after the first dance :-\
A bemused Santa was a very appropriate appendage there.
Russell