Despite the fact that I have now been researching my family history for almost 25 years, there are always new documents to be found and ancestral haunts to visit, so in this final post of the 52 Weeks challenge I’m going to reflect on the discoveries that stood out as particularly memorable during the past… Continue reading Memorable
Tag: Suffolk
Musical
This week’s post could easily have been very short as I have never heard a single member of my family playing a musical instrument ! I know that my mother and my aunt had piano lessons when they were children, and my grandmother’s sister, Ada Howe, played the violin in an orchestra in Winchester, but… Continue reading Musical
Rural
Wantisden is a tiny rural parish in Suffolk, which lies mid-way between Woodbridge and Orford in open countryside that still feels isolated today. For more than 100 years, my ancestors called it home - in 1851, there were just 78 inhabitants living in 23 houses, and remarkably they include three sets of my maternal 3x… Continue reading Rural
Water
I have previously written about the surprising discovery that my great grandfather, Samuel Cullingford, was working as a maltster in Burton-on-Trent in 1891, 150 miles from his Suffolk home, but in 1881 he was actually even further away as he appears in the records listing vessels in Penzance harbour. Extract from the 1881 census for… Continue reading Water
Animals
My Suffolk ancestors once worked with an animal that is now rarer than the Giant Panda – the Suffolk Punch horse. Bred as a heavy draught horse, in the 19th century there would have been several thousand at work on farms in East Anglia, but today there are fewer than 500 left in the UK with… Continue reading Animals
In the News
My great grandfather, Walter Henry Howe, and his father, John Howe, both feature regularly in newspaper reports of court hearings, but thankfully as witnesses rather than in the dock as they were both gamekeepers and the cases involve poachers. The gamekeeper’s role was to manage the wildlife on their employer’s estate to ensure that there… Continue reading In the News
Off to Work
When I started researching ancestors who lived in rural Suffolk in the late 19th century, I soon noticed that young men were quite often missing from census records for the places where I would expect them to be. For example, my great grandparents, Samuel Cullingford and Esther Page, were married in Wantisden on 29 July 1890… Continue reading Off to Work
Travel
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… Continue reading Travel
Artist
The only professional artist in my tree is my mother’s cousin, Rosamond Cullingford, who had a studio in Lyme Regis and painted under the name Rosamond Higgins. Rosamond was actually a double cousin as her mother was my grandmother’s sister, Ada Howe, and her father was my grandfather’s brother, Arthur Cullingford. Arthur was a gamekeeper… Continue reading Artist
Wedding Bells
My maternal grandparents, Mildred Howe and William Jack Cullingford (always known as Jack) were married at St Peter’s Church, Yoxford in Suffolk on 22 October 1925. No one in the family knows how or when they met, but the hospital where Mildred worked as a nurse from 1919 – 1925 was in Woodbridge, just a… Continue reading Wedding Bells
Sleuthing Notes 