A Kind Granny

Emma Jane Grew nee Degville

A few years ago, following the death of my husband's aunt we visited her husband. As we walked down the garden path we smelt the smoke from a bonfire behind the house.

Her son and his wife were incinerating his mother's belongings, personal things collected over a lifetime. Precious to her, rubbish to them... What affected me profoundly, was the sight of photos being tossed into the flames, curling with the heat, blackening and rising as ash with the smoke.

"Why are you burning  photos, " I asked.
"We don't know who half of them are," came the reply.

Like most people I've 'inherited' photos from deceased parents or grandparents.They're stored in boxes at the bottom of the cupboard, occasionally looked at. Some I can identify, others I think I maybe know, but many are 'before my time' and unfortunately there's no longer an older generation to ask.

But even these nameless ones are part of my past and have a connection to the present through me. So, usually on long winter nights out they come and I name who I know or add something such as "my mum's cousin" and give a choice who it might be.

Why bother you might think, who will care? Very recently, my cousin Gill and I were looking through a file of paperwork.

"Who's this?" She asked. There she was, Emma Jane Grew nee Degville, our great grandmother, George Degville's granddaughter. Our direct link to George. The person from whom had come the stories.

So he wasn't the dashing fencing master fleeing the revolutionaries, but nor was he the pauper in the workhouse, but it was those stories that incited the urge to discover our ancestry.

I don't remember from whom the photo came or when I got it, but fortunately I'd named her and we were looking at her heavy lidded eyes and wavy hair, and recognising her familiarity. In my dad's words, "My kind granny."

Maybe a future generation will look at an old photo from a box passed down, see a vaguely familiar face, turn it over and discover their past.

Marilyn