Mary Ann Matilda Ball 1848-1931

This is an account of another ordinary life, albeit one full of births, deaths and marriages. Mary Ann Matilda Ball is my paternal Great Great Grandmother. She lived to a good age, and although she seemed to have suffered more than her fair share of personal tragedy, I get an impression of a strong, persevering woman who, when necessary, stepped up to the plate and took on the responsibilities necessary to survive.

The Ripened Wheat by Jules Bastien-Lepage,
courtesy Wikigallery.org

Mary Ann was born in 1848, the year that revolution swept across Europe. However, the uprisings and social upheaval were a world away from Girtford, the small agricultural hamlet in Bedfordshire where Mary Ann was born. The hamlet lay on the Great North Road about two miles south of Tempsford where she was to spend all of her adult life. Her father, Edward, was an agricultural labourer. Her mother, Matilda, was to provide Mary Ann with her middle name.

By the time Mary Ann was recorded on her first census in 1851, the Ball family was complete. Mary Ann was the youngest child and, together with her two elder sisters, Fanny and Ellen, the family lived together in Girtford village. Their peaceful existence was not to last however as, in 1853, when Mary Ann was just two, Edward died at the young age of 28. His widow, Matilda, made a living from lace-making, a traditional livelihood in Bedfordshire, and supported her three young daughters single handed for the next ten years until she married for a second time in 1863. I believe that Mary Ann learned a lot from her mother about how to cope in times of adversity. She would have witnessed her mother's strength and I suspect this had a profound effect on Mary Ann's character and her own ability to strive through traumatic events.

Inside a Bakery by Gustaf Olaf Cederstrom, courtesy Wikigallery.org

At the age of 19 Mary Ann married a young baker from Tempsford, Samuel Hardwick. Together they lived in Langford End in Tempsford and raised four children, my great grandmother Ann, Fanny, Ellen and finally young Sam. Tragedy struck again however. When Sam was just a few months old, in June 1880, Samuel died of an epileptic fit. He was 33 years old. And this is when Mary Ann must have looked back and remembered her mother's resilience and incredible spirit, for she took over the family business and ran the bakery in the village. She was assisted by a journeyman baker, Henry Thompson, and her eldest daughter, my great-grandmother, Ann, who was only a child at the time. It was discovering that Mary Ann took on the bakery that made me develop a great admiration for her. She had a young family, including a tiny baby, and even though she probably had little choice but to take on the business, I still applaud her 'keep calm and carry on' attitude.

In 1885, Mary Ann married again. John Randall was a local man who worked as a general labourer. He had been born and bred in Tempsford, and the couple settled down to married life in the village that had been her home for the last 18 years. Mary Ann's propensity to give birth to girls continued with the birth of Alice, Florence and Winifred Mary.

Samuel Hardwick, died 1917

However, life was to deliver some harsh blows to Mary Ann, particularly in relation to her children. In 1882, two years after the death of her first husband and whilst still a young widow, her second born child Fanny died at the age of eleven. If that wasn't bad enough, eight years later, Mary Ann and John Randall's eldest, Alice, died of tubercular meningitis. She was 13 years old. And then came the war. Mary Ann's only son, Sam, was serving with the Royal West Surrey Regiment in France in 1917 when he was mortally wounded and later died of his wounds. Mary Ann outlived three of her children, a not un-common feature of life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But it must have been devastating to lose two daughters to illness and then her only son in such a violent manner.

Mary Ann and John lived together in Tempsford until his death in 1928. She outlived him by three years and died at the ripe old age of 82.

Mary Ann, for me, is one of those ancestors that I just took to straight away. I admire how she stepped into her husband's flour-covered apron and made a living for herself and her family. Her's wasn't an easy life, it was marred by too much tragedy, but she survived, picked up the pieces and carried on. And because of that, she'll always be one of my heroes.

Fanny Hardwick 1834-1898: An Ordinary Life

This is the story of one of my ancestors, Fanny Hardwick. I chose to write about her by using the scientifically proven method of closing my eyes and sticking a pin in a list of my forebears! Over the last few weeks I had been struggling to find an interesting subject to blog about. I had been concentrating on all the 'compelling' folk, the people who I knew lots of things about. But then it dawned on me that ignoring those people with, dare I say it, 'humdrum' lives, meant that their stories were at risk of being lost, of never being written about because they appeared to be run-of-the-mill, unexceptional, average. But who am I to say that they led pedestrian lives just because they weren't documented except in a census or church record? Just because they didn't fight in a war, or invent something, or die horribly, or end up in a newspaper article doesn't mean they shouldn't be remembered and recorded for posterity. So here is my first randomly selected ancestor, my Great Great Grand Aunt, Fanny Hardwick.

Tempsford in the early 1830s

Fanny was born in 1834 in the small village of Tempsford in Bedfordshire. She was born midway through the  reign of William IV, and just three years before William's niece Victoria ascended the throne. Tempsford was a small agricultural village nestled on flat, open land with the River Ouse forming a natural boundary to the west. The village was cut in two by the Great North Road, the main coaching route from London to York since Roman times. As a very small child, Fanny would have seen the stage coaches passing through the village carrying passengers and mail to far off cities and towns. This was before the coming of the railway put an end to the centuries-old coaching tradition.

The Widower by Jacques Joseph Tissot

Fanny lived with her parents, Ezekiel and Sarah, in Langford End which formed one half of the village. At the time of Fanny's birth there were roughly 570 residents in the village, and the majority of these would have worked on the land. Fanny's father was no different. For most of his life he was an 'ag lab' or 'grazier', though, for a time, he was also a road labourer. By the time of the 1841 census Fanny had been joined by a younger sister, Mary. A year later, in 1842, the girls' mother, Sarah, died at the young age of 31. Fanny was eight, and her little sister was just four. Ezekiel suddenly had two small daughters to care for as well as a living to make. It must have been a difficult and upsetting time for this young family.

Ten years later however, circumstances had changed and life was very different. In 1851, Fanny was 17, and she was still living in Langford End with her father. But by this time there were two new additions to the family. Within three years of his first wife's death Ezekiel had married again, to Ann Esther Ibbot Miles, a lady with a very long name! Together they had Samuel, my 2 x Great Grandfather. Fanny was working as a lace maker, in keeping with many women in the area who were able to work from home supplementing the family's income.

The Lacemaker by William Weatherhead

How long Fanny was a lace maker I don't know, but at some point after 1851 she found work as a live-in servant in the home of one Joseph Addington who also resided in Langford End. She was to live there until his death twenty years later. On the 1861 census she is listed as 'servant', but by 1871 her occupation had been inflated to 'housekeeper'. Fanny was the only servant who lived-in; Joseph may have had other day servants, but Fanny was the only one who lived there all year round. Joseph, who described himself as a 'gentleman' was much older than Fanny, and one of the village's 'gentry'. He was obviously considered to be one of the more well-born inhabitants of the village.

By the time of the 1871 census, Fanny was 37 years old and still unmarried, a fairly rare state of affairs for the times. So I was pleased to discover that on Christmas Day 1874 she wed a local market gardener, George Cope, and settled down to married life with him. She was 40 when her wedding took place, and it's possible that they tried for children but were unsuccessful. I'm intrigued as to why she waited so long to marry when the majority of her peers would have been marrying and having children when they were barely out of their teens. Fanny had lived with her gentleman employer as his 'housekeeper' since her early twenties. Had they enjoyed more than a master-servant relationship which society would stop them from making official? Or maybe she was too busy to marry; running Joseph's home may have taken all her energy leaving her with no time to even meet possible suitors. Joseph died not long after the census in 1871. His death clearly left her free to find a partner to share her life with. Enter George.

Fanny lived out the rest of her life in Tempsford with her husband. They lived alone in their cottage in Nags Head Lane, next door to the local inn.

In 1898, aged just 64, Fanny died. I was amazed to discover that she had made a will and left behind effects worth £364, 17s, 8d which according to the National Archives currency converter is around £20,000 in today's money: a small fortune! How did she amass such a large amount of money? Perhaps her old employer, Joseph Addington, had left her some money in his will (I'll have to investigate) or maybe Fanny and George were just careful with their money. I'll probably never know. George outlived her by four years; he died in 1902.

So that was Fanny's life. It's very ordinary and not at all unusual, but I'm so pleased that I've documented it. I've really enjoyed writing this blog post, as, even though all the evidence for her life comes care of census records and BMD records, it still reveals so much of the person and the times they lived in.