A Family File

Hetty Jane Owen, 1883-1953

This blog starts with a family box file. The file sat on a shelf over many years, and periodically, it would be brought down, opened, and its contents spread out and looked at, without any deep understanding of what they were doing there, where they came from, and what story they told. It was clear that they related to family history, but not much more. There were, for example, a handful of scrawled Victorian letters, an original Times newspaper from 1805 reporting the victory at Trafalgar, a letter about an elephant written by one George Wombwell, and details of an auction in Belfast when ten lots of County Down lands were sold off to the highest bidder. Mainly these documents related to the family ancestors of Harold Eldridge’s mother, Hetty Jane Owen. The family history here represents an attempt to make sense of the people, places, and events that emerge.