Letter from January 1846

This is a letter that I found in the documents and photos that Cindy shared with me. I believe Laura had collected the items over the years.

It's a letter that Edward Walker's father, Thomas, wrote to Edward's mother, Mary in 1846 - January 15 to be exact. It's written on heavy paper and no envelope. The letter was folded and apparently sealed with wax. Written in pencil is: E B Walkers. I'm assuming that Mary Walker was dividing up letters that she had saved and written E B Walkers on it so that it would go to Edward and his family. The following is what I think the letter says:

Bull KM London -14th 46

Dear Mary - We arrived here 10 minutes past five hungry and tired of rail way carriages. We think of going to Mr. Robinson's tonight. We have finished an excellent cup of tea in a splendid room. I wish you were well enough and here with us. You would enjoy it very much. I will send you another letter on Friday if I have not sold the cheese. I shall come home on Saturday at the farthest. I hope sooner for there is nowhere like home. I have no children here to play, no dear Mary to open my mind and ad. . . .with but I hope the ruler of the universe will direct and guide my steps. In true affection, T B Walker.

(I tried to update the punctuation, so it's not a direct transcription.)

Thomas is on a business trip and misses his wife and children. This letter was written more than 18 months before Edward, Gussie's father, was born. Thomas and Mary had three girls and one boy when Thomas made the journey of nearly 200 miles one-way from Bradfield Green to London to sell cheese. Thomas is identified in the 1851 English census as a farmer with 2 employees. After his death in 1854, Mary and the family moved to Russia Hall that we visited last year in Tattenhall near Chester England. Mary continued the dairy at Russia Hall. The barns from that dairy are still standing, but the farmland has been sold off from the manor house.

Belle or Lalla

When I last wrote, apparently quite some time ago, I teased you about the story of Lalla or Belle. Now I've come to complete the story. Lalla lived into at least the 1960s, but Belle perished in the London Blitz. As far as I can tell the Blitz was basically in 1940, but I haven't found anything that says exactly when Belle died.

Ada, Gussie's sister, corresponded with Lalla and in a letter explained to Laura Leib about Lalla and her family. The following is an excerpt from Ada's letter to Laura.

The lady who wrote of it is my first cousin her mother was father’s sister. This girl is the one who painted the picture of our fathers’ home which you saw in our dining room. Her husband is dead but she lives near another cousin of mine named Mary and her husband is living. The Joyce who she speaks of is the only child of their sister who was killed in a raid during the war. She and her husband were both killed. There were three girls in this Croston family and mother liked them so well when she met them while in Europe.

There's more correspondence that I'll post another time.

Lalla or Belle

I thought I had finally figured out the daughters of Ann Walker Younger Croston, but now I'm not so sure.

If you look closely at these pictures from Gussie's scrapbook in each picture the same woman is labeled. (Gussie liked to write on pictures, convenient for her, but not so much if you'd like to see the picture.) In one photo she's labeled Lalla and in the next one, she's labeled Belle. I'll give you more information later, but there were three sisters, Henrietta, Lalla & Belle. Henrietta is the bride, but would anyone like to venture a guess as to which one's really Lalla.

Thanks. Susan

Correction

After further research I believe Ann was never married to a Younger, but her husband's first wife had children by a Mr. Younger. I'll keep you updated.

A note about finding relatives. Yesterday I was trying to track down some of the English Walkers and I was able to make a hit. To refresh, Gussie's father, Edward Walker, was the only one in his family to move to America. His one brother, Thomas, and his seven sisters remained in England. From items Cindy gave me that came from Laura Leib I knew that his sister Ann had had 2 husbands. It's noteworthy only in that I didn't have the first name or age of either husband. She had married a Younger and a Croston.Census and family records indicate that Ann was born in 1851.

Using that information and doing some preliminary searches I came across a William Croston. Adding William and assuming he might have been born in 1851 in with the fact that Ann had daughters named Lalla, Isabelle and Etta, I found the family in the 1891 English census records. But according to that record her husband's name was Samuel and he was born in 1837. Why making up a husband and his birth-date made it easier to find Ann and her daughters I'm not sure. Armed with this additional information I now know that Lalla married a Robert C Bruce in October 1919 in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England.

Adding credence to all of this is a picture in one of Gussie's scrapbooks of a Croston Younger wedding. In the back of my mind is some mention that Betsy, Lalla's aunt and her daughter, Ada, traveled to England for one such wedding.

More Ocean Travel

When we flew from Chicago to London this summer, it became clear to me that we were flying a similar route to the one Betsy and Edward Walker had taken in 1897. Our flight was at 33,000 feet plus and they were at sea level. Also our flight took slightly more than seven hours and their trip took seven days. I'm slow, but at some point, I thought, aha, that's why it's called jet lag. If you're taking a day to change one time zone, I believe you would be adjusted to the time change when you got to your destination. We did our whole trip in only a day longer than it took them to sail from Quebec to Liverpool. There are many aspects of their trip and our trip we could discuss, but I'll only say it's hard to fathom travel that slow.

The following is another excerpt from her diary. As Sally says, would it be that hard to put in a period or even a comma.

Left Quebec at 9 o'clock quite calm and very pleasant our ocean voyage commenced from Quebec and the log taken - life on an ocean liner commenced in earnest. The stewards and stewardesses are all very agreeable. Mr. Walker left the . . .

. . . and laid to directly after we saw the mail tender leave the shore the tide was going out fast and they made quite a detour to reach the steamer. They unloaded the mail freight and some passengers and then loosed their ropes and when they were cleared the captain started the S S California. We sailed until noon of the 7th and made 309 miles. (We covered 500 miles an hour)We were in the straits of Belle Isle and it began to get foggy.

We're back from the United Kingdom & I can now add to the blog. The following is a brief story of how we found the Walker Manor or Russia Hall as it is known. Through the family tree records that Cindy & others had collected, I found that Edward Walker was from Cheshire, England, although it may have been Wales at the time of his life. Through Ancestry.com I found that he had lived in Tattenhall, Golborne Bellow, before he moved to Kansas. I was able to look at the census records from 1800s in England & to see that his brother continued to live at Russia Hall. The British census records are only available until 1901, but also through Ancestry.com & other family records Cindy provided I could tell that Edward's nephew continued to live at Russia Hall through the 1940s.

Cindy had given me a picture of Russia Hall that Laura had. I scanned it in & tried to improve it a bit. I then printed it & took it with me. I tried searching for Russia Hall on Google, but all that came up was an antique store named New Russia Hall in the Tattenhall area. We went to that business and showed our picture to the proprietor and she said she had seen it and told us exactly where to find it. To me it looked like a generic English manor so I was surprised she could recognize it.

We followed her directions and were able to find it down to the mailbox with "Russia Hall" on it. It was startling to see that picture come to life.