Rebecca Clarke

I have decided to share a few of the chapters I have been working on for my talk/writing on the travel diaries from 1898 - 1910. This is work in progress but will form a part of a larger work looking at the holidays of the Clarke girls. In light of the current sweltering heatwave covering England and Europe, I thought that this would be an appropriate first chapter to share! Research is tricky regarding the bathing, or should I say, swimming habits of the middle-class families in Victorian...

As mentioned in my last blog post, the majority of the family archives consists of diaries, letters, photographs and ephemera written and collected by three women, sisters Edith (E.R), Anne (Queenie) and Winifred (Winnie or Winks). Smart, driven, active women, these sisters documented their lives and carefully kept the records and this has provided me with a wealth of inspiration. The main challenge is working out where to start and I have decided to start at the beginning, so to speak. ...

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...