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Time travel – family history, handwriting, and meeting a familiar stranger

LisaTulfer Leave a comment

Recently I have been spending time in 1950. No, this isn’t some weird Lockdown experiment.  Nor is it one of those popular history programmes on television, where a family pretends to go back in time to another era, where they invariably find that a) everything is much harder work than they are used to, b) the food is boring, bland and monotonous, and c) women have a considerably worse time of it than in the 21st century suburbia they are used to.  My time travel is altogether more personal.

I have blogged before about the cache of family photographs and papers I inherited a while ago.  Most of them relate to the maternal, Dutch side of my family.  But there are just a few items from the paternal side, including, for some unknown reason, my grandfather’s diary from 1950. 

Detail of diary entry for Thursday 30 Paril 1950

This side of the family were Liverpool Welsh, part of the large community of immigrants from Wales which was a significant part of the population in the great port city of Liverpool, in the North West of England, from the middle of the 19th century.  A large proportion of the Liverpool Welsh originated from the island of Anglesey, off North Wales, probably due at least in part to the island’s tradition of fishing and seafaring which would give them plenty of relevant skills for working in the docks.  My grandfather was born on Anglesey into a seafaring family – he was just five years old when his father died when the ship he was skippering went down with all hands in Bardsey Sound in the 1880s.  Although the details I was told by my father are a little hazy, there is documentary evidence that my grandfather was in the Merchant Navy at some point in his life, and also that he was the captain of a tug boat based in Bootle docks.  I wonder how it felt to be able to see Anglesey across the water from the banks of the Mersey?

I never knew either of my paternal grandparents as they died long before I was born.  Neither did I ever meet most of the cast of characters whose names are familiar to me from my father’s stories and from Christmas cards – aunts, uncles, cousins.  But in this diary I get a snapshot of their lives, their preoccupations, their daily activities and their holidays, and little details such as my grandfather’s birthday presents (socks, a muffler and a neck tie).  Several weeks of the diary are devoted to the business of getting electricity installed in the house, and frustration with Mr Jones, the electrician (presumably another member of the Liverpool Welsh community), who doesn’t turn up when he’s supposed to, and goes off for days at a time to work on other houses, leaving the place a mess and the job half done.  It seems some things don’t change!

From my grandfather’s diary, I learn a lot of things I either didn’t know, or wasn’t sure about.  One of my uncles is a coal merchant, and he and his wife and young son are obviously going up in the world as they are the proud new owners of a motorcar, a pre-war Rover 10.  This same uncle upgrades his coal lorry, only to have an accident when his shiny new purchase collides with a tram cart on Derby Road, in the docks area, and has to be ignominiously towed back to the coal yard for repairs.  One of my aunts, disabled by polio as a child and still living at home aged 43, goes on holiday to London and while there marries her pen-friend (a precursor of internet dating?).  This event warrants only a couple of lines, and none of the family seems to have attended.  Did she elope?  It’s a possibility, but there is an intriguing sentence a month earlier, when the pen-friend is staying with them in Liverpool: “hoping for the best.”

There are some things which seem inconsistent to me.  His world seems very small – every day consists of shopping and housework for my grandmother, a walk for my grandfather, various uncles, aunts and cousins visiting every day to do things like help carry the shopping home, scrub the doorstep or bring round the evening paper, taking it in turns to keep them company in the evenings.  More than half of each day’s entry is pretty much a verbatim repeat of the previous day, and his life seems a far cry from the active 71-year-olds I know these days.  But the family also travel extensively – I know from photographs that my grandmother visited London on holiday in 1948, and according to the diary in 1950 various family members have vacations in North Wales, the Isle of Man, and London (in the latter case, lodging with other members of the Welsh diaspora).  They have a daytrip to see the Flower Show at Ruthin in North Wales (my grandmother’s home town).  My father at this time is living in the South West, and my other uncle is at college near Sheffield, with placements all over England and even Ireland.

Extract from diary

My grandfather’s spelling is positively Shakespearian at times, often phonetic, with a level of literacy which suggests he was not educated beyond elementary school.  However, he reads the newspaper every day (including newspapers sent by relatives in other parts of the UK), and engaging with the written word through keeping a diary is obviously important to him.  There are hints too that it is my grandfather who deals with the business correspondence for the uncle with the coal yard.

I find the nature of his Welsh identity enigmatic, too.  For example, I know from my father that my grandfather was a first language Welsh speaker, but he chose to write his diary – that most personal document – in English.  Where he does use Welsh, for example in place names, his spelling is every bit as erratic as it is in English!  As with so many in the Liverpool Welsh community of the time, much of the family’s social life is based around Welsh-language churches and chapels, although by his own account my grandfather attends less than the rest of the family – he prefers to listen to Sunday morning services in Welsh, from chapels in Wales, on the radio.

Each day’s entry starts with a report on the weather: “Very nice morning nice and clear not too cold, wind South West light” or “rather dull at first then rained hard, stoped [sic] some sunshine then more heavy showers and more sunshine. Wind about South West by South.”  Along with occasional references to going to sign for his Seamen’s Pension, it’s the only clue to his years aboard ship, where the state of the weather – and the wind in particular – would have been of utmost importance.

I have written about the personal nature of handwriting, which gives an immediacy and intimacy that cannot be replicated by the typed or printed word.  Through this diary I have spent time with someone who is at once both familiar and a stranger.  I know of him, but almost everything I knew before reading this was mediated through my father, who was a fairly unreliable narrator.  I never knew my grandfather – but although I never met him in person, I have here in my hand a book which he held, every day of the year.  I have his words, written with a fountain pen, the quality of his handwriting reflecting his state of health on any given day.  I can see where he has gone back and added in an afterthought, or corrected a mistake in the day’s chronology.  This man is responsible for a quarter of my genes, and this is the first time I have had any physical contact with him.  When I turn the pages, I am touching his fingerprints.  This is the closest I will ever get to him.

The last full entry in the diary is for Boxing Day, Tuesday 26 December 1950. He writes:

“In the afternoon R and B came up for us all to go to there [sic] house for a party, but owing to the coughing and spitting I stayed at home.  I hope that they will have a good time there.”

The following day he writes only “Nice day” – not even a weather report.  Within a fortnight, just a few days before his 72nd birthday, he is dead.

Front of diary - 'Letts Desk Diary 1950'

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Image of a silver locket, with three black and white photographs in it.

Lost people, lost stories – the mystery of the silver locket

LisaTulfer 1 Comment

In the window of a local charity shop is a silver locket.  I walk past the shop most days, but today something catches my eye and makes me go back for another look.  The locket is priced at £8, and is battered, with a mismatched chain, but what attracts my attention is that it still has old photographs in it.  On a whim, I go into the charity shop and buy the locket.  The volunteer seems a bit bemused about why I am so sure I want this particular piece, but I feel that I can’t simply walk by and leave it there – this was someone’s life, someone’s loves, someone’s history, and it’s too sad to just let it go.  I decide to write about it.

Image of a silver locket, with three black and white photographs in it.

I like detective work, and my partner is an experienced researcher, so between us we should be able to find out a bit about the locket and its history.  First of all, I clean it up and repair the chain.  The locket is stamped ‘Silver’, not hallmarked or marked 925, but that’s perfectly usual for small 20th century British silver items and doesn’t help us much.  The chain is newer and not such good quality as the locket, which is machine engraved and quite heavy.

Image of a small black and white photograph of a middle aged woman with dark hair.

Inside, there are three photographs – a middle-aged man on the left, and a middle-aged woman on the right with another photograph half tucked behind it.  With the tip of a penknife I carefully prize the clear plastic cover off the right hand side, and take out the photographs.  The middle-aged woman (let’s call her Mum) is standing in front of a sash window, which has net curtains.  If this is her home, she probably cursed when she saw the photograph, because the curtains aren’t hanging straight!  She’s wearing a striped dress with a wide, white collar, fastened with a brooch, possibly a cameo (my partner tells me that the style is 1930s or 1940s, as is the man’s shirt collar).  She smiles gently, straight into the camera lens.

Image of a small black and white photograph of a teenage girl with dark hair.

The photograph which is tucked behind Mum is of a young woman, perhaps in her teens, with a dark wavy bob.  She is side on to the camera, and looking down – the photograph is cropped, so we can’t see what she’s looking at – something in her hands?  A book?  A kitten?  A flower that she has picked?  This one is also outdoors, but on a path beside an old building with trees and what looks like creeper.  The sun is shining.  Is this her home, or is she on a day out somewhere?

Image of a small black and white photograph of a middle aged man with dark hair and glasses.

I wield the penknife blade again, this time on the left hand side, and remove the photograph.  I turn it over, and this time I’m in luck – there’s faint pencil writing on it.  ‘Dad Taken L……. 1939’.  My partner was right about the dating.  It’s really frustrating that the location is so faint and impossible to read, despite my efforts to digitally enhance my photograph – if you can make it out, please contact me!  Dad has a moustache and round spectacles.  He wears a white shirt, a tie with broad stripes, and a waistcoat.  Like Mum, he’s standing in front of a sash window, although it’s hard to tell if it’s the same location – the frames certainly look similar.  He is dark, too, much thinner than her, and with a serious expression.  The reflections in his glasses mean we can’t see his eyes.

Image of back of small photograph, with pencil writing.

Who were they?  Is the girl with the dark hair the owner of the locket, or maybe her sister?  Posing for the camera in his shirtsleeves in the summer of 1939, in the calm before the storm, little does Dad know that only a few weeks later the country will be at war again.  He is old enough to have served in WWI, but too old for active service in WWII – he will likely go into the Home Guard, or be an ARP warden.  Mum will have to grapple with rationing, clothing coupons, and making sure that not a chink of light shows through those net-curtained windows.  The girl will be old enough by the end of the war, if not at the beginning, to serve in the forces or the Land Army, or to do a job vacated by a man who is away fighting.  If the photographs are from near where I found the locket, in Norfolk, she may fall for one of the American airmen at a local base.  Did these people, and the house, make it through the war, or was this locket worn as a memorial when all that was left was the rubble of an air raid?  Was the locket loved and cherished, worn daily until arthritic hands could no longer manage the clasp?  How did it get so battered, almost as if it has been trodden underfoot?  And eight decades on, how did this precious memento of the summer of 1939 and three people’s lives end up, unloved and unwanted, in a charity shop in Norfolk?

If you know who the people in these photographs are, please get in touch!  And please share this post on social media, so that as many people as possible can see it and maybe we can solve this mystery together.

Image of silver locket.

Portraits of the past – my family history in photographs

LisaTulfer 1 Comment

Last year I came into possession of a large collection of family photographs.  I am the last person standing on that side of the family, so on the death of the last of the previous generation is all passed to me.  We’re not talking a few albums here – the collection completely filled the back of an SUV!  Most of the albums were in poor condition and had been stored in damp or dusty places, so a priority was to remove all the photographs (copying the annotations onto the back of the photos where appropriate) and throw away the wreckage of the albums.  There were also a lot of loose photographs, as well as some in frames (many with broken glass).

Eventually, I was able to group them into rough families, eras and locations.  There were a huge number of duplicates, so the first edit was to choose the best of the duplicates, again copying any annotations, and put aside duplicates for cousins in America if they were likely to be of any interest to them.  Then, I went through each group of photographs, weeding out any which were of no particular family history interest, or where the features were blurred, or choosing one from a series of almost identical shots (there were lots of these, especially 1950s landscapes.  It was apparently a thing in Scandinavia to take many photographs of the back of people standing in a field gazing at distant hills…).

After many evenings and weekends of going through photographs, peering through a magnifying glass at blurry faces, and getting very dusty, I have now whittled the collection down to a single crate, all divided into acid-free archival envelopes labelled with details of the contents (pre-war Holland, Helsinki Olympics 1952, holiday to Wales July 1961, etc).  I also started a notebook, with a page for each year, so that I could track the events and movements relating to the various strands of the family.  One wet Sunday afternoon this winter I plan to create a timeline from the notebook, which colour coding for each branch of the family, for the whole of the 20th century (and also scanning the most interesting ones of shared ancestors to send to my American cousins).

This side of my family is Dutch (via military service in the Dutch East Indies and internment in Japanese camps during WWII), with various members emigrating to America, Finland and Britain.  It has been a fascinating – and occasionally harrowing – exercise to follow individuals from newborns, through rites of passage, family memories, pets and holidays, to ageing, and in one case, death (it seems it was the fashion to take open casket photographs in 1940s America).

I have glimpsed the interiors of Dutch colonial houses of the 1930s, Scandinavian holiday shacks in the 1950s, and American ranches in the 1970s.  I have found that some of the stories I was told as a child were true, and others were not, while still others have got garbled in the telling.  I have been saddened by the toll that WWII took on my grandfather (he was in his 60s when I was born, so I never knew him as anything other than old).  I have been moved by how much my teenage grandparents were obviously in love, in photographs from their courting days which I had never seen.  I have seen my own features and expressions looking out at me from the faces of long-dead relatives.  And I now have a much clearer sense of who I am, and where I have come from.