DEARMAN & MOLLETT

The lovely Maude started me on the whole family history thing.  She was my grandmother but I never knew her, or knew anything about her, not even her name, other than that she died young of TB.  She has been a woman of mystery and constant surprise. Which is why I chose the picture at right to represent how I felt about her.   I think she was also the first ancestor whose story I wrote.  I have learnt more about her since then, but the questions still keep coming.

There was a photograph in my parents’ possession of a rather beautiful lady, in profile, date ca 1920 or maybe a little earlier.  Did she have her head resting on her hand?  Did she have a hat like the one above, or a scarf wrapped around her head, as was sometimes done in those days?  I can’t quite remember.  In my head I have my father telling me that this was his mother, and that she was beautiful - or have I made that up?  The photograph has disappeared - was it one of the things my mother burnt when my father died?  Did it ever exist anywhere other than in my imagination - my siblings cannot remember it.  Gone too is any chance to find out anything about her from my father.  All I remember him saying was that she died young, indeed both his parents did, from TB.  So, I assumed really young, and that they died within a short space of time of each other.  But not so.  She was young, but not that young, when she died - 41 - and my father would have been 18, not a child as I had somehow imagined, because I also have it in my head that he told us he was brought up by his aunts - two old ladies we visited with some trepidation in their Victorian home in Dulwich.  And then, it seems, as we investigated their lives, that he went to sea for the first time, literally almost as soon as she was dead.

And then there is the notion that she was a music hall artiste?  Where did that come from?  I do find that it is firmly in my head but have no idea how it got there.

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And then we were given some photographs, by our rediscovered cousin - 2nd or 3rd - I really cannot work it out.  I suspect a couple of the possible ones of her cannot be her. The clothes are wrong for when her children were born I think.  So maybe they are of Florence, her daughter.  But the other - shown above is extracted from a wedding photograph (I suspect her sister's), and it is clearly my father in the back row.  So I am thinking that the lady next to him - the lady in the blurry photo above must be Maude. Not quite as beautiful as imagined, and rather sad looking - and just a tiny bit dumpy.

There was lots to find out - and indeed, there still is.  Now that I see the meanings of her two names I begin to speculate that they might have been strangely apposite - strength and strife, bringer of joy - it seems she might have been all of these things.  To read her story click on the sections below or to read about her husband, click on the link below.