RootsChat.Com

 

Aha! as I suspected: two William Lushers, shoemakers, married to Marys or variations thereon. Thank you all so very much. I don't have a paid subscription to the censuses, so finding Wm Junior's out of county wife was not easy. And the name Lusher | Lasker | Lushy etc etc...well, all the usual genealogical crazymaking.

So to recap, I have the two families as of 1841:

William Lusher (c1787 Wortwell Suffolk &  Mary Daynes  (c1787))
m. 1809 Burston near Diss, Norfolk, England
William Wragg LUSHY 1810
James LUSHY 1812
Susan LUSHER 1814
Sarah LUSHER 1815
Mary LUSHER 1818
Elizabeth LUSHER 1820
Emily LUSHER 1822
Harriett LUSHER 1826 [- 1826]
Matilda LUSHER 1827
Harriett LUSHER 1830-1848
Christopher LUSHER 1834
all in Diss, Norfolk, England

And William Junior's family
Wm Jr & Mary Ann SHARMAN, marr. 08 Nov 1832, Wortham, Suffolk
Ann LUSHER 1834
Sarah LUSHER 1835
Susan LUSHER 1838

1841
William Lusher 54
Mary Lusher 54
Mary Lusher 23
Matilda Lusher 16
Harriet Lusher 11
Christopher Lusher 7

New Street, Diss,
Lusher, William  M  30
Lusher, Ann  F  29   Not born in county | 1851 Mary Ann Lusher b c 1812 Wortham, Suffolk
Lusher, Ann  F  7
Lusher, Sarah  F  5
Lusher, Susan  F  3

And thank you, Trish, I do have Alfred for Matilda. He is first in a line of 14 children!
 
Now to find out what happened to James 1812; Susan 1814; Sarah 1815; Elizabeth 1820; and Emily 1822.

If anyone saw any of these folk in Diss while poking about in the censuses, feel free to sing out.

Thank you all once again.

Wendy

There are some fabulous, wonderfully intriguing stories here, and I'm ashamed at how few of them I know.  And I did a degree in Canadian studies!  Thanks for posting the link!

Thanks, J.J.

I suspect it is Marion, if it's either of the sisters, as Hortense eventually went in for abstract painting after her career painting china, whereas Marion did landscapes.

What I know about the painting:
It is either a full-length or 3/4 portrait, a large canvas, about 2 metres high, 1 metre wide. It details a tall woman in dark clothes, with possibly a black shawl, carrying a leather satchel (like an old-fashioned doctors bag), standing against a backdrop of fields. She had strong features ("a face like a hatchet", to quote my mother). The frame was dark. The model was my great- great- grandmother, who emigrated to Canada in 1905 to join her daughter's family in Hamilton, and died in Hamilton in March 1928 (which gives a relative time period and points to a Canadian artist, possibly even someone resident in Hamilton, as the model lived in Corktown and worked in service).  According to my mother, it was at the head of the stairs of the old AGH as you went in. (As a young woman, she used to go 'visit' with her when the family had errands in town.)

Either it was on long loan to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, or it has disappeared from their records, as I had the current curator have a look for it and she came up empty.  What I will have to do, I think, is go down there for a face to face next time I'm back in Hamilton. I've contacted the Women's Art Association of Hamilton (which has been around since the late 19th c) to see if perhaps one of their older members remembers the painting. Then I'll comb the national salon reviews for the decade of the 20s for likely artists and descriptions of the painting. But it's all slow forensic spelunking.  But I'd give my eye-teeth to see that painting. Great-great-gramma Hazell launched me into this whole family tree business, and I feel a connection across the generations to her.

Thanks, everyone, for all your help. Shall I mark this one completed?

Well, it's a strange little search, but seeing as you asked...   

My gggrandmother, at some time between her arrival in Canada in 1905 and her death in 1928, was the model for an oil painting that used to hang in the Art Gallery of Hamilton in the 1930s. The painting was entitled "The Pioneer Woman".  My mother, when she was in her teens, used to go 'visit' the painting when the family was downtown doing errands.  I've contacted the current curator of the gallery, and she's been unable to track the painting down. 

I have methodically been going through the artists active in Hamilton at the time, and there are two likely suspects, Hortense and Marion Mattice, sisters who later became reasonably well-known Canadian artists. In the 1921, Marion would be caring for her widowed mother, Sarah Louise Crompton Mattice, and Hortense, having married John Sloan Gordon in 1920, will be, one would presume, at his address.

I am trying to see if these two artists are living anywhere close to Corktown, the area my family lived and worked in. So, in short, I'm looking in the 1921 for the addresses of:
Sarah Mattice, b. c. 1853
Marion Mattice, born 1878
and
Hortence Mattice Gordon, b. 1886.

Any and all info received with fawning gratitude.