BarlowCrisp

 Barlow

My maiden name was Barlow.

I started researching my family history and that of my husband in 1995, although I had asked a few questions when my parents were still around (thank goodness!)

My father especially had a few intriguing stories to tell, one even had a grain of truth in it! He was born in 1910.

Family History Legend Number One

First, he had this old photo of three little boys in a playpen in a dark old kitchen. One of them was him, although he didn’t say which one. He said he had been taken to a stately home in Norfolk where he was cared for for a while. He had been born in Mile End and on making further equiries of my cousin, who is a lot older than I, it seems that there was a “Lady Bountiful” that did good works among the poor, including running a clinic. My Dad was particular that I knew the name Lady Bentinck.

Through seeing an article in the journal of the East of London Family History Society, I contacted the writer who had transcribed the Catholic Parish Register of the Guardian Angel in Mile End. The name had struck a chord as my father had also mentioned it. Jean Maynard, the writer of the article, put me on to Exton Park and the work of Lady Norah Noel, daughter of Earl Gainsborough whose seat was Exton Park in Rutland. I looked up their website and contacted them, outlining my story. A very helpful lady sent me a photocopy of an article that was published in the “Lady’s Feld” in 1915 that described Lady Norah’s “experiment” with taking undernourished poor children and installing them in a cottage that she had converted in the grounds with nurses to care for them. There was a photo in the article - exactly the same one as I have from my Dad! So it was Rutland not Norfolk he went to. On the reverse of the damaged photograph I have is written, presumably to my Grandfather, ”To Barlow. Francis came to us           weighing       .  Now           weighs        . ” There followed an instruction to “look after him ……..and physicially”.

It was after this episode that Lady Norah married and became a Bentinck.

So far so good.

Family History Legend Number Two

My cousin, the one who had told me about the Lady Bountiful, also told me the story of how my father and his siblings (her mother being the oldest of the brood) became Catholic almost by accident. There was no earlier history of the family being of this faith. When my father was very small he contracted polio. Being unbaptised but his parents fearing for his life, his father, Benjamin rushed off to ask the vicar to come and baptise the ailing child. Vicars didn’t baptise on demand like that, it smacked of superstition. So my distraught grandfather rushed off to the local Catholic priest, made the same plea and the priest obliged. And once done apparently Grandad then said “While you’re here you might as well do all the rest. (My father was the youngest of the tribe). Not quite.

Jean Maynard, with the Parish Records to assist, explained that the parents would have to have signed a note to allow it officially for a start. And the older children would have been asked to assent themselves. But they did all end up in that faith, some more devout than others.

Family Legend Number Three

My Grandad was carried on the shoulders of Blondin when he crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

Despite reading books on Blondin and even writing to the author of one, who must have researched the great man but had never heard of my great grandfather (not my grandfather), and not being able to substantiate this story, there is a link.