Thank you all for the welcome!
I'm going to the museum today to see if I can get a look at the dresses, probably wont be able to as it's Saturday and I get the feeling you need the curator to show them. Hopefully I'll get to see the paintings tho'. I am meeting my cousin who lives just round the corner and didn't know anything about them.
Apparently there is a whole collection of documents and artifacts at the museum that my Mum's cousin Guy collected over the years and left to the museum before he died in 1999. The dresses had been handed down to him from his mother. He was a great geneaologist and there are rumours in the family that he traced the Jeromes back to when they were Hugeunots in France who fled to the Isle of Wight to escape persecution from the Catholics. Some stayed there and some went to America. A few generations later Jennie Jerome was born, the mother of Winston Churchill.
I'm hoping that I can tie it all in with my family tree! I know I am very lucky as my mother, grandmother and great grandmother all treasured the photos and documents so they survived in the family, some of them for a hundred and fifty years!
