The family archivist
- Rebecca Clarke
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
It was about 15 years ago when I became the archivist for my husband's family archives. I don't know that they had ever thought of this collection as archives, it was just regarded as stuff that hadn't been thrown away and that might have some interest but no one was prepared to properly deal with it. The archives are a collection of letters, papers, diaries and other ephemera that stretch across about 150 years. The earliest document I have found is a sort of obituary for an ancestor on my husband's maternal grandmothers side of the family and it is dated at 1805. The other early documents are primarily deeds to pubs in Kent and some birth and death registrations. There are also a small collection of notebooks from the 1850's where the young woman concerned copied poetry or writing and in addition to this, from the same time, there are some samplers of which I have had one framed. The archives really get busy when the marriage of R. Feaver Clarke (my husband's great grandfather) marries Rebecca Sowter in 1881 in Milton, Gravesend, Kent. The couple brought a great love of family, education, philanthropy, music and sport to their marriage and they combined their family records, kept them safe and instilled in their daughters an appreciation of documenting life. Dorothy, Edith, Queenie and Winnie were the surviving daughters of Feaver and Rebecca. Four well educated, curious girls who were keen to try most things that came their way, As young girls they dabbled in art and music and had a keen interest in cricket, sending each other and their brothers postcards with cricketers on them and commenting upon games they had seen, They travelled regularly with their family and also with their wider family, most often their aunt, Lady Dinah Pearce and usually kept diaries of their adventures.
As teenage girls and young women, Edith, Queenie and Winnie, grabbed life by the hands and threw themselves into the kind of education that was not necessarily that common or available to many girls. Queenie won the Kent prize and gained herself admittance to Cambridge University to study the mathematical tripos. Edith and Winnie became heavily involved with the Dalcroze movement and with physical education for girls with Edith becoming a schools inspector and Winnie, after spending time studying psychology at Cambridge University and travelling to America to teach and study in Iowa, became involved in sports psychology and women in sport.
The aunts never married and it has been discussed at length in the family as to why not. Was it due to the lack of men after the First World War? Was it that marrying might mean that these educated and driven women might need to give up their careers? Is there a love story that ends in heartbreak that we just don't know about? Could one or more have them been involved in a same sex relationship that could not be public knowledge at that time? We just don't know for sure although we do have some suspicions! What we do know is that all three women had swathes of female friendships and spent much of their lives traveling or going to the theatre or socializing and documenting it. In the archives I have travel diaries dating from 1898 to the mid-1960's. I have letters scanning an even wider time period. And then there are the photos, hundreds of photos from staged, formal family photos taken in the 1880's and 1890's of both the immediate and wider families to snapshots from holidays (some annotated, most not!) to school groups to landscapes and views. What to do with these photos is one of my biggest challenges.
Letters, diaries, photographs we have all of these things and I haven't even touched on the papers, certificates, books, programmes - the list goes on and on and on and I have only just started working through them and using them as the basis or inspiration for my writing. My first and third books were based on the letters from internment, the second inspired by newspaper clippings and now I am working through a small collection of travel diaries from 1898-1910 that i have so far transcribed and am now using quotes from them to create firstly a talk and hopefully, from then, a book. But I am only scratching the surface, I have shelves, cupboards, trunks full of material.......I just need to work out what to do with it all. There are some great stories to be told, I just need to find my way into them.
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