Here is another one from the old family photograph album.
This one shows my grandmother and was taken around 1890, once again at a Henry Bown studio.
She appears to be very well dressed in a velvet bodice and skirt (How about that waist?), and a magnified close-up (click on image) of her jewellery shows a star shaped clasp at her neck with matching earrings and a large cameo hanging from an elaborate chain. The chain worn below it appears to be of the kind that men attached to their pocket watches at that time.
I know very little about my grandmother except that her maiden name was Mariah Offord and that she was probably a country girl, as my grandfather’s family were farm workers, his father being born in Ireland in 1845 and who is recorded in the1861 census as a ‘ploughboy’ lodging with a ploughman and his wife (also Irish) in a cottage on a common near a village in the Surrey Hills.
The picture shows a rather grand young lady and yet my father’s family were very poor; my grandfather being shown on my father’s 1901 birth certificate as a ‘bricklayer’s labourer’, a job which was common among poor ’Irish’ workers at that time according to the census for that year.
The picture below shows the same woman …
… about thirty years and ten children later.
