Category Archives: Forster

Family history, Forster, Jenkins, Meredith, Poulson, Procktor, Shepherd, Williams

Families from Faulds to Williams – roadmap to the blog posts

I’m not finished writing family short stories, but there are enough for walking through them to be confusing. My second cousin mused how great it’d be if a Wikipedia-like service could organize all online family stories. It would, but as an interim step I thought I’d try a roadmap/Table of Contents as a start.

WordPress has a search feature – which works well – but that presumes you know what you’re looking for. With the bow tie charts to show family in our three groups and a list of posts about each of the people, I’m hoping content will be easier to navigate.

Continue reading Families from Faulds to Williams – roadmap to the blog posts →
Family history, Forster, Procktor

Procktor, Forster & Owen families blend in pre-WWI Stoke Newington

I usually think of London as “big” – it certainly felt that way when I was a student there in the 1970s. During recent research on my maternal grandparents and their forebears, I plotted homes (using census and electoral rolls) on an old ordnance survey map. Once I realized how short a walk it was from one house to the other, it became apparent that for three families, Stoke Newington was more like a village than part of the capital city of a huge empire.

To keep family stories from becoming too abstract, I’ve included another bow tie chart showing the relatives mentioned in this story – my mother’s parents, her grandparents, and one set of great grandparents. My mother was born in Chingford, Essex – her parents had moved away from Stoke Newington a year or two earlier – but Wynne’s first cousin, Olive Marie Procktor (whose son was a DNA match, leading to unraveling this tangled family connection) was born in Stoke Newington and baptized in the church in which her parents married.

Continue reading Procktor, Forster & Owen families blend in pre-WWI Stoke Newington →
Family history, Forster, Procktor

Yvonne paints Wynne & Len

Yvonne Forster, my Mum, sketched, painted and drew for most of her life. Some scribbled drawings accompanied her diaries – abstract ideas or objects or decorated letters. This was from a notebook with various rough sketches or watercolors – Mum always preferred communicating with pictures. Some painting was for income – she didn’t do many commissioned portraits, but her graphic design work sometimes included freelance projects (a children’s illustrated guide to crochet stitches is one I still have). I would get watercolor birthday cards until shaking hands and poor eyesight made it too hard (she could still do it but wasn’t happy with the quality). One subject stood out from all others – trees.

Continue reading Yvonne paints Wynne & Len →
Family history, Forster, Jenkins, Poulson

Growing up with our grandparents

Rose & Margo, Lyme Regis

This is part II of the story of four generations preceding me and my four brothers – our parents growing up between the wars in England and somehow all ending up in the theatre. For Yvonne and David, I have written recollections. Yvonne left many – some illustrated – diary-like notes and a book, Mind Boggled. David left a stack of notebooks filled with a scribbled draft of a memoir he never finished – to his credit, he numbered the pages, books, and various inserts – in his near-illegible writing. It’s mostly theatre name-dropping and “funny stories” but parts are about his early years. A characteristic blend of gauzy generalities of an idyllic childhood and tales of David’s excellent adventures. Old newspapers add details – of piano competitions, school prizes or sports matches – plus there are stories we heard from them growing up. David’s “Progress Book”, written by Billie, and a few notes in an album by Wynne are the only accounts from the grandparents directly. Margo’s brother Harding kindly provided some childhood stories for her. I’d like to offer a sense of where they lived, went to school, what home life was like, and to sketch out their path from babies to the adults we knew.

Continue reading Growing up with our grandparents →
Family history, Forster, Jenkins, Meredith, Overview, Poulson, Procktor, Williams

Who were those people in the family tree?

I’ve spent many hours combing through records and newspaper articles about ancestors and long-dead relatives, and although there’s much I don’t know, I realized I have lots of thumbnail sketches of where they lived, what sort of work they did and occasionally other snippets of information which I haven’t shared. The more substantial stories – such as interfering in an election in Pontefract – have blog posts, but the smaller details are only in my head. Recently I sent my brothers two bow-tie charts, and one replied that it looked odd as he’d never heard of many of the names. Time to put a little flesh on those bones!

Continue reading Who were those people in the family tree? →
Family history, Forster, Poulson

Born in London with ancestors in Utah?

21 Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, London (picture courtesy Google Street View)
21 Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, London (picture courtesy Google Street View)

Deciding to take a DNA test has been a source of all sorts of surprises – an unknown cousin, for example. The discovery of Cornish mining ancestors for my husband’s family as another. My current puzzle is how a kid from Camden Town in London (photo on left is the flat my parents lived in) has DNA matches to a group of people who have been living in the USA since the 1860s. The more digging I do, the more clear the picture becomes with one small, but important, missing piece – how this group of related people in the US is genetically connected to me!

Continue reading Born in London with ancestors in Utah? →
Family history, Forster, Procktor

Emigration charities and “pauperism” in 1870

Yvonne Mary Forster's ancestors
Yvonne Mary Forster’s ancestors

My mother’s stories about her Procktor ancestors, based presumably only on what her mother had told her, told a story of her great grandfather, a cabinetmaker, being a Quaker pioneer who went to Canada, returning to London when her grandfather was 12. It turns out the real story has no connection with Quakers at all (that I can find anyway).

Continue reading Emigration charities and “pauperism” in 1870 →
Family history, Forster

Winifred Adelaide Procktor in Mum’s social history

Winifred Adelaide Procktor 1918
Winifred Adelaide Procktor 1918

I provided an overview of my mother’s social history of her parents for teacher training college in a separate post. This is the detail section for her mother, Winifred Adelaide Procktor. I scanned and converted into text (production note: OCR software is still sadly an almost-success where fixing up errors almost negates the time saved) to improve readability, but the spellings (English versus US) and rather odd sentence structure – more like notes than an essay – I left intact. You’re seeing what my mother turned in – it surprised me to see such ragged work, but possibly she was pushed for time given other coursework.

Continue reading Winifred Adelaide Procktor in Mum’s social history →

Family history, Forster

Leonard Cyril Forster in Mum’s social history

Leonard Cyril Forster 1919
Leonard Cyril Forster 1919

I provided an overview of my mother’s social history of her parents for teacher training college in a separate post. This is the detail section for her father, Leonard Cyril Forster. I scanned and converted into text (production note: OCR software is still sadly an almost-success where fixing up errors almost negates the time saved) to improve readability, but the spellings (English versus US) and rather odd sentence structure – more like notes than an essay – I left intact. You’re seeing what my mother turned in – it surprised me to see such ragged work, but possibly she was pushed for time given other coursework.

Continue reading Leonard Cyril Forster in Mum’s social history →

Family history, Forster

Mum’s social history of her parents

Yvonne Poulson
Yvonne Poulson

My mother, Yvonne Mary Poulson (née Forster), attended Teacher Training College at Eastbourne College of Education from 1966 to 1968, intending to become a school teacher. She didn’t finish the training – she said managing classroom discipline as a teacher walking with two sticks (or in a wheelchair, which she sometimes used) was impossible for her. As part of the course she completed a social history of her parents. Amazingly – given the number of moves and other upheaval that followed – it didn’t get lost or tossed, and I have inherited it.

Continue reading Mum’s social history of her parents →