Tag Archives: Jenkins

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.

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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.

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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!

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D’Ouseley’s relative Thomas Wilson of Harold Tower

Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries, Scotland
Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries, Scotland

Richard Standish D’Ouseley, my stepmother Margo’s great-grandfather, was Collector of Customs in Douglas, Isle of Man, from 1861 to 1872. A prominent citizen in Douglas, Thomas Wilson, who had made his name and apparently a lot of money as a draper with several locations, was reportedly related to Richard D’Ouseley. From around 1860, Thomas Wilson and his family  lived in Harold Tower, the 1833 “folly” pictured above. He leased it, presumably when he retired as a draper (in the 1861 census he is a “Retired Merchant” and doing rather well at age 55).  For a few months in 1871, Thomas Wilson lived at the Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries, a lunatic asylum, in a truly bizarre set of circumstances.

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The Cheddar method of Joseph Harding

Joseph Harding, 1805 - 1876
Joseph Harding, 1805 – 1876

l am satisfied that whether we make cheese at Dalgig among the mountains, at Cunning Park amongst forced grass, or among heather at Corwan, where Mr. Wason is making the desert to blossom as the rose, there is no difference whatever. My opinion is that good cheese can by good management be made anywhere, whether at the Land’s End or Caithness, if it be in the hands of a person who has something in the upper story.” Joseph Harding addressing the Ayrshire Agricultural Society in 1861. Having learned a lot about making great cheese and having tested his theories by teaching Scots farmers how to get equally great results, Joseph Harding’s views were now sought out.

Joseph Harding image credit

It was no small incentive to his first fans, Scots farmers, that his cheese fetched  £80 per cwt versus theirs only £50. Time for a field trip to see if they could improve. In 1854 an article in The Scotsman noted “In no department of farm management is the Scottish farmer so decidedly behind his English neighbour as in the manufacture of cheese.Continue reading The Cheddar method of Joseph Harding