December 2020 archive

Annie West: The Saddest Christmas Shadow

Annie West only lived to be ten.  Her unmarked grave, shared with eleven others including five babies, is in Queen’s Road Cemetery, Walthamstow;  the plot was resold many years ago.  In the final decades of the nineteenth century, when Annie lived and died, it was all too common for families to lose a child, sometimes …

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About a Girl: Rachel Harriet Gravestock

The face under the boater would look more at home in some shadowy corner of the Escorial Palace than in that slightly unkempt garden in Edwardian Berkhamsted, so perhaps the legend is true after all.  My mother had a store of stories about her ancestors, some more likely than others, but this was the one …

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Permanent link to this article: http://lissachapman.co.uk/uncategorized/rachel-harriet-gravestock/