Cousins laid to rest

My aunt was sure cousin Eva married the bus driver and settled in San Francisco. I combed through all the 1940 census and found a husband who was a railway carriage cleaner. Everything matched up, and to my delight the San Francisco marriage indexes, now in image form on FamilySearch, confirmed this.

Rumoured to be illegitimate, it was certainly a surprise to note she survived her father 93 years, and was nearly the last of her generation. Thank goodness my great-aunt was around to forestall this awkward eventuality.  Her father passed away of tuberculosis in Wood Green not that far from me some time before the first world war.

It really is odd she survived so long. We had a phone call in the 1940s to tell us her older sister had died, exhausted by finding money at all hours of the day - and still another sister was confined to Colney Hatch lunatic asylum in the thirties. So hats off to Eva for clawing her way to the end of the century.

Another of the cousins disappears off the face of the earth in 1964 having proved her mother's will. She was then living in Surbiton. It now turns out she used the money from the estate to buy her own cottage just outside Henley.  But she only enjoyed the cottage for two years before passing away herself. The person with whom she occupied the cottage survived another 29 years however.