Child of Cornwall: Forget Me Not

Margaret Trewhella was born at Towednack on the Atlantic coast in 1784. At this time her great grandmother Catherine Baragwanath (born 1701) was still very much alive, which is far back into the Trewhella annals. Margaret had access through this channel to a wealth of old Cornish folklore, including uncle Matty whose love for a mermaid was doomed from the off.

Margaret married a dapper thin tinner, whose photograph and miner's tinder box I once saw. Lord knows where that is now. She was 30 at her marriage and doubtless a strong influence on her four daughters.

Before they spread over the world, the second daughter produced a sampler, photographed above. "Oh my child, forget me not!" A strange sampler for a child, unless firmly directed by a mother like Margaret.

This morning I attempted to date the doggerel. Couldn't be 1851 as Eliza, the embroideress, was married by then. That year, a book, Fields's Scrap-book, came out, and was sentimental and mushy enough to securely cross the Atlantic. A peek at Fields's biography suggests he penned a first edition much earlier, in 1833, Kentucky. Not only was Eliza a young girl then (12) but her uncle J. T. Hichins of Trannack in Sithney was then still living nearby, a woollen merchant. Did he provide the colourful skeins, I wonder?

Some university library in the States is sure to have Fields's first edition, and I for one would like to know if he remembered to include the rhyme "Forget Me Not" back in 1833, as I strongly suspect.

Long Honeymoon in Norfolk: 25 years waiting for a child

In the course of finally investigating my maternal line, having failed to notice I even had one...

I came across the Long family of Spooner Row, Norfolk. Elizabeth Long married in 1879 at the parish church, age 19, and she comes from the same Norfolk uterus as I do, so is my uterine relative. (Thus Edmund ap Tudwr was a uterine brother of poor Henry VI.)

She has no children listed in the next THREE censuses until Alice Martha, her daughter, arrives in 1904. That's a 25 year wait. The GRO index confirms there were no other births from this couple.

Exhausted by his endeavours husband Walter Green dies and is pegged out five years later.

Around the same time, the ageing reproductive equipment of Elizabeth's father, 60+, grinds back into action, courtesy of a much younger second wife.

Alice was recorded as incapacitated in the 1939 register, which may indicate she was living with Down's, not sure.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has seen such a long gap from the wedding to the birth of a first child.