"THE CHILDREN ARE ABOUT THE SAME AND THE TRADE IS THE SAME - WHEN HE EARNS IT I HAVE IT."

(Susanna's Letter dated March 5th 1896)

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It was this sentence that stuck in my mind more than anything when I first started to read the whole batch of letters.
What TRADE, and what a HARD LIFE this must have been.
Little did I know that already Tracy had been in touch with Steve, and already they had discovered a complete migration of a whole family, and other people from Glemsford,
to SKERTON in Lancashire, and later their return to Glemsford.

Over the next 6 months, we discovered a monumental amount of different addresses, and countries to which the people of GLEMSFORD travelled.
The men travelled far and wide to South Africa, for the BOER WAR and CHINA for the Boxer Rebellion, whilst the women travelled for work, just as a generation before them, a large group had travelled to Lancashire for work in the Cocoa Matting Industry.

ARAMINTA herself we can trace to London, Dover, the Isle of Wight, and lastly KEIGHLEY in West Yorkshire, to be married.
(She did,however, end her final days in Bradford).

KEIGHLEY in West Yorkshire: a small town in the Aire Valley, predominately a Textile Town,with large mills.

We have a reference to the Mills in Mrs Savage's last letter dated 1913, telling Araminta not to send Hilda (her daughter) into the mills, but to teach her the art of cooking.
This obviously fell on deaf ears, because that is where Hilda did end up, and most people did, working hard shifts, with the mill hooter sounding every morning, and woe betide anyone who was late.

As far as I know Araminta never worked in the mills, but remained at home whilst her husband John McGuire sought work wherever he could.
Araminta had five children of her own, and then brought up Olive and Ethel. They were sent up from Glemsford because, as you will recall, Susanna died shortly after the March 5th 1896 letter.

Araminta and John McGuire with their family, and Araminta's sisters, Ethel and Olive

Indeed she refers to herself as not being well, small wonder after producing so many children, and the living conditions that must have been the norm for the working class of late Victorian/Edwardian Period.

We have a small glimpse of diseases such as Typhoid, Smallpox, Quincy treated with homemade poultices, and the abscesses that Martha endured on her fingers, obviously through the constant work and scrubbing she must have done at the tender age of 14.

Araminta finally worked for the Lord Mayor of Keighley, and was married from his home on 2nd November, 1902.

Wilsden near Bradford is not far from Keighley, only the next Valley and this is where we find Araminta in 1912.
She remained there until shortly before she died, (she died in Bradford in 1948) and her final wish was to see the Daffodils in bloom again.
I do hope she did.

Jacob Smith Brown (Tracy's grandfather) moved up to Keighley.
We can only suppose that he followed his sister.
We don't know, but it was in Keighley in 1959 that he died.
Tracy has recently found out that Jacob married Alice Sarah Webber in Newcastle, in the last quarter of 1916.

So why did Araminta come to the North West?
I think the simple answer is work, and again I refer back to Susanna's words:
"When he earns it, I have it."

As a result of being able to trace a family, to the degree that we have, Tracy and myself finally met in person in August 2005, in KEIGHLEY.
This was 109 years after Susanna's letter to Araminta.

I think we owe this in part to the unusual names that George and Susanna gave to their children, but mostly to the letters that were saved for a century.

Sandra Poole
September 2005

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