"harry" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com...
I'd love to know the circumstances of the photograph being taken. As far as we know, she was from a fairly poor mill-worker family, so how did they get the money to have a studio portrait made? Did their friends and relatives think that they were mad to "waste" all their money on a "likeness"? What was the occasion when it was taken, a few years before her 21st birthday?
My grandpa has written a brief family tree showing the line back from me to her, and he's written "Aged 18 on photo" which I've crossed out and written "16-17" and "1855-6" - I *think* I may have found a date on the photo somewhere. Her first child was born in 1867, so this was about 10 years before she got married, given that children usually followed pretty close after marriage, in the days before family planning ;-) My dad's got all the family tree research which would give much more info.
The photo was left to me by my great grandma who died when I was about 13, so I remember her - weird to think how old and frail she seemed compared with mum who is now about the age that great grandma was when I remember her. We've got a cherished recording that my dad made of great grandma and grandpa (her son) talking about life when they were growing up. They both witnessed a tram crash at the bottom of a steep hill in Dewsbury, and grandpa remembered "a ball of rags" rolling across the cobbles just before the tram hit the bank, as the conductress bailed out. Great grandma remembered having to live with her grandparents (the woman in the photo and her very strict husband) because "I was sickly and hadn't to climb hills" - and her grandparents lived at the top of a long hill near her school whereas she and her parents lived at the bottom of the hill; her grandpa made her drink cod liver oil every morning after breakfast which invariably made her throw up ("so the efficacy of your breakfast was somewhat doubtful - cos it didn't stop down long enough to do any good" Grandpa commented, in his rather flowery language). Her grandfather wouldn't let his wife wear a dress that she'd bought by installments until it was fully paid for ("makes a mockery of grandma's mail order catalogue", grandpa commented about my grandma being an agent for Empire Stores mail order). Grandpa remembered taking his dad's lunch to the iron foundry where he worked, and seeing a fight between two men (one of whom turned out be his dad) on top of a gantry next to the red-hot furnace chimney, when one man had gone "mad" due to carbon monoxide poisoning and my great grandpa climbed up to wrestle the guy to the ground before he fell off and killed himself. Another occasion he walked into the foundry yard with his dad's lunch and saw a horse that was pulling a dray killed when a huge casting dropped from a crane several feet from my grandpa. And so on, for two hours, one story after another.
What would they (even my grandpa, who died in 1979) have made of computers and the internet, and all the social changes that there have been. Ruth Dyson, in the photo, died in 1910, so she never knew about the horrors of WW One, or that several of her grandsons fought and were killed in it - or that one of her relatives fell on hard times after being widowed and had to resort to "earning her living on her back", as you might say :-)