This project is going to be harder than I realized. I want to create a narrative and I thought taking one picture at a time would provide the timeline. The problem is, I cannot tell the timeline from the pictures, in many cases. I am piecing things together as I go, so I may make a mess of this. For now, I will push on and hope for the best.
Keeping the generations straight for the purpose of effectively telling the stories is challenging, too, particularly when names are similar from one generation to another, e.g., my great-grandmother was Jean and my grandmother was Jeanne. I think I assumed that carrying on the same names from one generation to another was something only people with land and wealth did. Since I am clearly not descended from gentry, I must be wrong. (That’s what I get for reading too many biographies of royalty, not enough about the working man and woman.)
I thought I would start by writing chronologically, and with what I know about Nelson and Jean Marr, whom my father clearly remembers. He was close to my great-grandmother, Jean and was 19 years old when she died at 73. I think the relationship with his grandfather, Nelson, was more complicated, maybe because my grandmother – named Jeanne, remember – revered her father. “Revered” does not even capture the adoration she had for him, or at least she did by the time I knew her.
Okay, so here’s another thing I did not anticipate: my feelings about family coming to the fore so immediately and clearly. I thought, stupidly, that I could be “objective” since these are old pictures, many of them of people I never knew. But they knew the people whom I knew and their influence, like my great-grandfather Nelson’s influence on my grandmother, ultimately helped shaped who I am.
As I said, this project is going to be harder to write than Travels with E. And more time-consuming.
That is a very long way to say that I do not have many pictures of the Marr family. Grandma put this picture in the album and that is my father’s handwriting on the back, clearly saying this is Bell Marr. After a search in Ancestry, now I know her full name was Isabella. She was born in 1878 and died in 1955, at the same address I found for other family members: 2 Cumberland Terrace, Glen Road, Laxey.
I do not remember one story about Bell. Now I want to find out if there is another Bell in a previous generation.
Unrelated thought: it’s interesting that the person who performed the burial ritual is named on this form. Was J. Lloyd, Vicar of Laxey the official certifier of death? I guess what I mean is, was this the death certificate? The parish’s list of deaths was preserved, lucky for me, but does that mean there was not a death certificate like ones we have now?