The fantastic Feltham sisters

 Edward Murrow - Elizabeth - Sarah - Sally - ANNA.

Anna was the tenth child, and only ten when her mother died. At 24, she was just three days shy of childbirth when she walked up the aisle at Ditcheat church, her ailing father perhaps accompanying her, and so she became Mrs Feltham.History repeated in that she too left a young family when she died at 40.

Thomas Feltham was a carpenter left with the following children: Ann 15, Susan 13, Jane 11, Hannah 8, Joe 2. They were not particularly religious baptising their children in clumps of two, except Ann who was of course baptised at the mother's parish of Ditcheat, a bit of time after the wedding. They lived in a cottage at Bayford, in the parish of Stoke Trister.

Undoubtedly the sisters had a tight bond as we shall see. Hannah and Joe would ultimately emigrate together. Ann and Jane would marry the same man, while Susan's eldest child (motherless too) would make her home with Hannah, and Ann would raise Jane's daughter having married her widower.

We peep into the world of the Felthams in 1840 when a farmer's daughter writes from Lamyatt to her sister in Ohio. Ann and Jane we learn are working for their uncle Joseph Whittock, farmer at Millbrook, Ditcheat. They would be domestic servants and Ann is still there the following June in the 1841 census, on the shelf.

It turns out that Jane had married in Bristol, to Richard Welch and the next letter refers to the newly weds settling in Ditcheat. Unfortunately Jane died four years later.

Around this time Joe Feltham (21) emigrates with his older sister Hannah to Springfield, Illinois, to work as a carpenter. We know this as his son's biography confirms it. It's 1844. She had been a highly competent maid at Cucklington Rectory, a short walk away, and most likely served as housekeeper. The arrangement cannot have lasted long as while Jane dies in Somerset, wedding bells ring out for Hannah in Illinois just two months later.

There are three more remarkable events to witness

1) 1847. Richard Welch, Jane's widower, remarries to her older sister Ann Feltham (now 37), who goes on to produce several daughters including at 43 the only Welch child who will continue the line. These will be the Millers of Ditcheat, ladies in a brief hiatus between their father's death and emigration to New Zealand.

2) 1855. Hannah returns to England from Illinois, now Mrs Rodham, accompanied by her young son Tom, who survives the crossing only to die back in the States. She must be tending to her widowed father, Thomas, who dies weeks later. Mrs Rodham returns like a will o' the wisp, back to America.

3) 1860. The year is unclear but it is after 1858 and before 1861. Susan has been dead ten years, and her family emigrate to South Africa where they will live an interesting and prosperous life as grocers and provision dealers to the silver- and gold-miners of Kimberley Town in Cape Province, numbering Cecil Rhodes among their customers. But, and there is always a but, tale remained there of a 14 year old girl who 'took the wrong boat'.

We return to 1855 to clarify matters. Accompanying Mrs Hannah Rodham back to the States was her 15 year-old niece, Anna. She emphatically had not got on the wrong boat, and we imagine had been in service to her grandfather, Thomas Feltham. She made a home with her aunt in Springfield before marrying at the age of 21 several years later.

So we have:

Ann - who by the way died a sudden perhaps gluttonous death at a richly furnished farmhouse in Kent miles from home, being found dead by a fifteen year-old servant girl (as she had once been). No longer the poor relation, on the shelf, but respected wife and mother. Though not by all. Marrying her sister's widower had cost her the home parish of Ditcheat where she'd so suddenly arrived in 1810. She could not stay to tend her infant daughter's grave but remained in exile. Her issue survive in Sydney NSW courtesy of her granddaughter Hope Smith.

Jane - died age 27 and buried in Ditcheat. Her only child had fits in later life, married a second cousin in the time of the hiatus and the line dies out.

Susan - died age 38 and her family lived in Kimberley, South Africa; and let's not forget, in Illinois courtesy of her eldest child.

Hannah - the ambitious one. Her descendants do trundle on, and in fact through her daughter, the female line continues. Hannah died at 53 like so many of these women.

Joe - including as a courtesy, but being male is outside the scope of this story. He marries a Frenchwoman and settles in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, and family flirt with Alaska unsuccessfully while another worked the forests of western Montana and dallied with life unsuccessfully.

May I say that Ann, at the heart of our tale, buffeted by fate, born in February 1810 so soon after the wedding, was born a Very Long Time Ago, and was dead by the time of the American Civil War. But as her son-in-law was born in 1861, and lived a long life (unlike Ann) we can exploit a quirk of the generations. There is a photograph in 1945 or thereabouts showing two lovely twin girls in Sydney (who are still alive I might add). In this photograph is their elderly great-grandfather, holding them!, just a year from death, and he is the son-in-law of Ann, born 1810. And of course I have met one of these twins, so we are just hop, skip and a jump from these fantastic Feltham sisters of so long ago.

Poor relations they definitely were, and we do not know their father Thomas Feltham's characteristics, but I remain delighted to see these ladies pickled in amber for us, hard-working ladies of their time, who moved from a life in service onwards to better themselves.

I wish to close with a photograph of a peaceful scene of a farm in Victoria, Australia, sheep safely grazing and one of Ann's descendants in charge of proceedings. But it would be an invasion of their well-deserved privacy, so I shall not.