Illegitimate sister, garbled details? Part Two

I was wrong, again
A confident, cocky tone in a blog post is never good.  I am returning to this blog cap in hand, admitting I was wrong.  The illegitimate sister 'born about 1922' was indeed born in about 1922.  Was she called Jane or Calista: er, no.  Did she go to Australia, ummmm.  No, to that as well.

From memory to fact
Here were the facts as presented.

'My sister Jane was born in about 1922 and was sent abroad, to America maybe.  My Mum kept a set of her clothes that she had worn as a girl.'

Maybe the clothes were something like this:

 
One step back
Galling is the word I would use to describe receiving that birth certificate of Calista from 1919 - the girl who went out to Australia from the Clee Hills.  I was so convinced, but actually secretly glad that I was wrong.  It felt too hasty a victory.  The battle was lost but not the war.

It's how you say it
Jane, Jane, Jane.  There were no Janes in the 1920s.  It just wasn't in fashion, like Margaret or Gwendoline aren't today.  But there was a May.  In fact May was the only option at this time.

If you say, May, it sounds like Jane.

 
 Where to now...
And May it seems didn't go out to Australia, but she did have connections with Ghana.  Now they should be interesting.  We are just waiting for for the birth certificate as proof.  Tick tock.

Long journey: Birds and Family Members Always Come Home

Some searches have you going through the wringer on your way to adding a twig properly onto the tree.  This parish magazine from Shropshire is charmingly online, and answers at a swoop who 'Major Roberts' was - listed in a family obituary, turns out he was Miss Jones's second husband - no wonder I couldn't make the connection.  Although born in Wolverhampton her parents brought her back to Shropshire to be baptised. I eventually caught up with the baby girl featured, now a director of a rather iconic part of Glastonbury Festival, lor' luv 'er!

Barbara G Walker is not an obvious addition to the tree, at first.  By and large we are churchgoers and hardline feminism hasn't won many supporters on this side of the pond.  However, peeking back into Barbara's (ironically, male) forebears - we see signs of plenty of strong women, who would give Barbara their strongest backing as she ploughs a very difficult furrow.  Maybe her extremism 'grabs male territory' so that most women can live their lives with a bit more freedom than the generation before.

Cordelia Fuller was one of those mysteries of a dozen years or more.  (And explanation has still not come in of who exactly Cordia lived with in the mid-west back then. Update: it has.)  Eventually I did not find her marriage by checking under her maiden name, but by waiting for her descendants, the Smiths, to post a tree on Ancestry.  Which they did.  Here is the original will, photostatted in 2000.

And here the photo of Cordelia as an older lady in the Smiths' heartwarming book, Ocean Depths.  The family still live and are based in Kansas and the mid-west.