52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 2 - A Favourite Find

Week 2 of this challenge is already upon me, time flies when you’re having fun! The subject this week is a Favourite Find and in my case this is not a person or an important breakthrough of a brick wall but is actually a medium sized rather dusty cardboard box.

A few years ago my uncle passed on to my father this rather tatty looking cardboard box to me which he had been given by their cousin. The box had been stored away in her loft since she had cleared out her mother’s house after she died in 1995. Her mother was my great Aunt Mary, my grandmother’s sister.

With some trepidation I opened this dusty box – or should that be treasure chest – to find a family’s entire history in the form of photographs, letters, birth certificates, school certificates and assorted documents telling the story of this middle class Edwardian family from the mid 1880s through to the end of the First World War.

With wonder I carefully emptied the box sorting the various items into separate piles marvelling at what I found. There were photo albums of my grandmother and my great aunts, with photos neatly described and labelled, framed photos of family members and even an original glass plate of my twin great aunts when they were babies.

There were letters between my great grandfather and his two oldest sons who were both serving in France during the war and as described in my previous blog of 5th November 2020 both were killed within 17 days of each other in August 1918. There are the letters from their commanding officers informing their parents of their deaths, copies of their wills and other service papers as well as their campaign medals and the two ‘death plaques’. There is also correspondence between their father and the War Office and Imperial War Graves Commission about him organising a visit to the graves and also a request that the brothers be buried in the same cemetery, a request that was denied.

Another fascinating find was the birth certificate and various letters regarding my great grandmother’s older sister, Winifred. There was a family story that there was an older sister who was never mentioned as she had died in an asylum. The birth certificate confirmed that Winifred Eleanor Lakeman, known as Nora, was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1885. She is listed in the censuses up to 1911. Winifred died in 1924 in the Murray Royal Hospital in Perth. There is correspondence between her father and the doctors advising him to come as Nora was seriously ill.

The contents of what has become known as ‘The Lakeman Box’ I carefully catalogued and re-boxed in a more substantial plastic box taking care to ensure that the delicate papers were stored to keep them well preserved. The photos are still being sorted and scanned to ensure that they are preserved and the research goes on.

There will be more about the Lakemans in future blogs as they are a particularly fascinating family who lived an interesting and varied life both in Scotland and in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The line has ended now as two sons were killed in the war and another died in infancy. My grandmother and her three surviving sisters are all no longer with us as too are my father and my uncle so it is up to me to keep the interest and the family alive in my writings and ramblings on here.