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Category: That's life | Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2019 6:30 pm

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2 My mother, as a young girl, loses her father and then her mother

In my first story in this series of family history recollections, I told of my maternal grandfather dying at sea shortly after the start of WWI. My mother at that time was just days short of her first birthday. My grandmother already had two sons and a daughter so was then a widow with four young children to support.


My grandmother with my mother c1914 ( photo / image / picture from Raddang's Garden )

I missed the opportunity to talk to my mother about her life before she married my father. Her widowed mother remarried when my mother was 8 years old. When my mother was still only 14 years of age, her mother died at the young age of 41 for reasons still unknown to me.

So my mother was now without either parent and from what little I remember, she went 'into service'. This was very common for young girls from families of modest means. This would mean that she would 'live in' as a servant with a family and do many household chores. I have a record of one great aunt who was 'in service' at the age of 12 years. The master and mistress were just 24 years old with two children. He was A Carrier, which probably meant he had a horse and cart to carry and deliver goods. This gave him an income which allowed him to employ servants.

This was in Victorian times and as servants they, 'Lived In with all found' and were rewarded with a very small annual salary.
I can well imagine that when my mother met my father, a proposal of marriage was happily accepted to gain her release from service. She married my father just 4 months after her twentieth birthday, and I was born just 10 months later.


My pre-WWII home ( photo / image / picture from Raddang's Garden )






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