Happy Birthday To You!

It's a big birthday - the changing of decades variety of birthdays - for AR today, and so I thought a little tribute to my Godmother would be appropriate here, especially as she has been such a help and all around encouraging force for this blog.  Generations to come will be able to look back and thank her!

She won't have seen these pictures in years (if at all), and since I just found them myself, I am posting these ones instead of more recent ones.  Happy Birthday BBAR!

A lovely schoolgirl visiting her big sister in London



Off on her adventures, leaving for Oz

The  Send-Off Committee, Southampton

Blizzard On the Way

We're all sitting around in the calm before the storm here on the East Coast.  There is one pummeling Ontario now, and an even bigger one coming up the eastern seaboard of the U.S. that is due to roll in here after midnight tonight.  It's eerily still outside my window, and I am watching a gang of roofers on the house behind mine racing to put on some temporary tiles to see the house through until Monday, I presume, when it will be safe to get up and do a proper job.  Unfortunately, I will have to go out in it tomorrow.  Twice. To and from the hospital - and I am not very happy about it.  For us hothouse flowers, the very best thing about winter is sitting inside and watching a storm rage outside.

Well, I have tried and tried to find a record of George Meadows' marriage anywhere at all in Suffolk, but I must admit defeat for the time being.  We are not going to find out which Mary Ann from Monk Soham is ours yet.  I know for certain that they did not marry in Monk Soham though,because that wonderful register book that I referred to in my last posting is also indexed, so I was able to look up every Meadows that had ever been hatched, matched, or dispatched in that parish, and there was no reference to George at all.  Brandeston is the next most likely place that they would have married, as that is where George Meadows' family was from, but no joy there either.

I did find out about the 17th century Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, though.  There was a novel about him that took place in Brandeston, and even a film based on it with Vincent Price playing Hopkins.  Given the events in the news today of the burning alive of a woman in Papua New Guinea who was believed to be a witch, I will leave this story for later.  I inadvertently saw the pictures, which I hope have all been removed from general viewing on the internet by now. 

On to a new line of enquiry again...

Marjoram

After puzzling over the name of Lily Maud Meadows' grandmother's name - Marjoram - and finding no reference to her anywhere other than the 1871 census online as transcribed by Ancestry.co.uk (not having viewed the original copy myself), I have come to the conclusion that she is Mary Ann Meadows, in all likelihood, as there are some other good connecting references to a George Meadows.  I'm still working on this, because the dates are all over the place with some children named Hannah and Frederick, which they had.  These dates don't match the ones I had for them, but the first ones could be the wrong ones instead, of course.

In another bit of blind luck, in 1920 someone privately printed the surviving registers of the Parish of Monks' Soham in book form, and there is a copy of it in a library at the University of California, which is available in its electronic form online  for all to view.  Oh, how I love technology when it comes to this enterprise.   I was able to go to the births section in 1818, which is when it is thought that "Marjoram" was born, and I found two girls born that year named Mary Ann.  The surnames are Barker and Smith.   One of these is probably our Marjoram.  So far, I have not found the marriage record for George Meadows, let alone that it was either of these two that was his bride, but it's a very good lead.

[Later]

I have now discovered something very interesting.  There is a book on Project Gutenburg called "Two Suffolk Friends", with the reminiscences of the Archdeacon of Suffolk, Robert Hindes Groome, about his father's  time as parson in Monk Soham.  If the above mentioned Mary Ann Smith, daughter of Phoebe and Samuel Smith, turns out to be George Meadow's wife, then I have something quite remarkable for us.  One of the many anecdotes of the parishoners he relates is about this Mary Ann's mother when her parents were living in a sort of parish seniors' home, an almshouse called Guildhall.

Phœbe Smith and her husband Sam lived in one of the downstair rooms.  At one time of her life Phœbe kept a little dame’s school on the Green.  One class of her children, who were reading the Miracles, were called “Little Miracles”; and whenever my father went in, “Little Miracles” were called up by that name to read to him.  Old Phœbe had intelligence above the common; she read her Bible much, and thought over it.  She was fond, too, of having my sister read hymns to her, and would often lift her hands in admiration at any passage she particularly liked.  She commended a cotton dress my sister had on one day when she went to see her—a blue Oxford shirting, trimmed with a darker shade.  “It is a nice solemn dress,” she said, as she lifted a piece to examine it more closely; “there’s nothing flummocky about it.”

I am greatly hoping to find out that Mary Ann turns out to be a Smith rather than a Barker now.  There are very few people, alas, who have a single written record of something an ancestor once said or did, beyond their occupation.  It may be a while before I can verify which one George married.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20576/20576-h/20576-h.htm