For the first time since I started the 52 Weeks challenge, this prompt had me stumped. One of the most striking features of my tree is that on the whole my ancestors didn’t travel very far from the place where they were born and those that did, thanks to a seafaring occupation, wartime service or emigration, have stories that will be told under other headings.
It is very easy to fall into the habit of focusing on ancestors like these, who appear outwardly to have led more interesting lives, and so I have decided to redress the balance by writing about the person who actually appears to have travelled the least in their lifetime – my maternal great grandmother, Esther Page.
Esther was born in a farm labourer’s cottage in Butley, Suffolk on 9 November 1868 and, so far as it is possible to tell, she lived within a few hundred metres of her birthplace for her entire life. Her parents were agricultural labourer William Page and his wife, Mary Fisher, who were married in 1861 and had ten children. In 1871, the family is listed as living in Butley Street – no house number is recorded but given its position in the census schedule in relation to the village shop and Inn, it seems likely that it was one of the cottages in the row pictured below.
By 1881, the Page family had moved to Wantisden Corner, which is technically in a different Parish but in reality just a few hundred metres down the road, and on 29 July 1890 Esther married Samuel Cullingford in the Parish church there. Samuel, who worked as a warrener on the Wantisden Hall estate, was not quite the boy next door but their extended families had been close neighbours for several decades and are likely to have worked on the same farms.
The Cullingfords had eight children, all of whom survived into adulthood: Louisa (1894), Alice (1896), William Jack (1899, my grandfather), George (1903), Bentley (1906), Harry (1907), Arthur (1909) and Emily (1912). In 1889, Esther, then a 20 year-old domestic servant, had also given birth to a daughter, Florence, whose father is not named in the birth registration – she was raised as part of the Cullingford family, and adopted the surname, but she also retained Page as a middle name and it is not clear whether Samuel was her biological father.
From the birth places of their children, Esther and Samuel appear to have started married life in Butley, but by the time my grandfather was born they had moved to the modest cottage at Wantisden Corner that would be home for the rest of their lives.
In many ways Esther’s life was one of remarkable stability as she lived in an isolated rural area surrounded by her extended family and amongst neighbours who rarely changed – three of the households in the row of six cottages at Wantisden Corner are the same in 1939 as they were in 1901. Further security was provided by the prosperous gentleman farmers who drew their workers from successive generations of the same local families, which appears to have shielded the area from the rural poverty that afflicted other parts of the country during the 19th century.
With the births of her children spread across 23 years, Esther had at least one of her offspring living at home with her for more than 50 years until 1940, when her youngest daughter was married. However, the later lives of those children reveal that the comfortable sense of continuity enjoyed by my great grandmother and by the community she lived in came to an abrupt end in the early 20th century, driven by modern agricultural practices, social change and world events.
By the outbreak of WWII, just one son remained working on the land in Wantisden, and most of his siblings no longer lived in Suffolk. None of Esther’s grandchildren were born in the place that so many generations of her family had called home.
Esther was widowed in 1940 but continued to live in the cottage at Wantisden Corner until her death on 18 May 1946 at the age of 77. She is buried beside her husband in the peaceful churchyard of St John the Baptist at Butley, just half a mile from the cottage where she was born.
Sleuthing Notes 