Wednesday 23 January 2013

The Summer of 1937

Following on from my previous post, there is a photograph of the family that was taken in the summer of 1937.

 My mother is 7 years old and is at the front to the left, next to her dad Sid. Behind mum is Sid's older sister Connie holding her son Peter. The lady at the back in the centre is their mother and my great grandmother Mary Anne Hemsworth who had just turned 80!. On the right of the photo is my grandmother Lily who has an arm around her son Jack. The final person on the photo to the right of the photo is Connie's daughter Mary.

And so just another family photo - well not really, inasmuch as this photo was taken at Ashopton in the Derwent Valley, a village that was to be submerged just a few years later to create one of England's largest reservoirs.





The Hemsworth Family - Sheffield

As this is the first post of 2013 may I take this opporunity to wish all my readers health and prosperity in the forthcoming year.

It has been a while since my last blog but I've hardly been slacking - far from it. After the publication of two books in the last year, I have rather a large back log of material to sort out. One of the main items was a scrapbook my late mother kept, in which she stuck family photos going back over a hundred years.

Many of these photographs I had never seen before, but thankfully my mother had labelled most of them and I have been able to tie them in with my reasearch. The problem was the actual scanning. My mother stuck then in a large scrapbbook with glue, and so I was unable to remove them. this meant manipulating each page a number of times until I could scan all the photos on that page.

They then had to be cropped, enhanced etc which took even longer. But the effort has been worth it. I have now started posting some of the photos of my ancestors to the website using



as an index. 


It is an absolutely fantastic photo of an Edwardian wedding that features the Hemsworth family in their wedding finery

The house was owned/rented by the brides parents John and Elizabeth Travis. The house still stands and a search reveals that the property was last sold in 2005

12 Broughton Road, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S6 2AS
£139,000     Terraced, Freehold     27 May 2005    
£31,500       Terraced, Freehold     14 May 1999

I have not been to the house which is adjacent to Hillsborough Park but it is on the list!