Granny's Tales and Treasures
Updated: Dec 18, 2024
It has been a bit of an effort but there are two new additions to the site this month. The first is the story of my great-grandmother, Clara Dawson, from her birth in 1858 until her marriage in 1886. Mrs Beeton's instructions to housemaids feature. You can read it here.
I have also put together all the school and Sunday school prizes that I was able to find still lurking in family possession. The story is here.
Finally, after three years, 14,000 words, 95 pages, 130+ footnotes and 70+ illustrations, the story of Ivy Gertrude Woolgar 1893-1863, my Granny, is finished. You can download it here but you do need to be patient as it is a large file so takes a while to download. She lived through a period of immense change, saw six monarchs on the throne, revolutions in transport and communications and two world wars. Her life in a London suburb was typical in may ways but her story is unique.
For good measure, I have also added some memories of the few years that I spent in Aston Clinton, in Buckinghamshire in the 1980s. You can find that account here.
For those of you who thought I'd forgotten all about this, I can assure you that it has been on the 'to do' list since I last uploaded anything. I have spent more time making some of the items accessible as pages rather than pdfs, which I know some readers prefer. This means there's been less time to create anything new. One thing that I don't think will ever be web pages, is Ivy's Story, which is my maternal grandmother's biography. This is now almost done and I have just added the section that relates to the Second World War. At 14,000 words and eighty five pages (so far) I'm afraid that one is a pdf or nothing. One more section, covering 1945 until her death in 1963, is still to come.
I have also added memories of the places I lived when I was at college in Reading.
