My family history
My mother’s family
link here
to a picture gallery of my mother Edith’s relations.
Here are links to individuals, with their relationship to my mother (when not too remote),
Ada Luck (aunt)
Annie Cockerill
Annie Luck (mother)
Betty Chamberlain (cousin)
Charles Luck (father)
Cyril Chamberlain (uncle)
Dolly Connelly (cousin)
Donald Luck (cousin)
Doris Cockerill
Edith
Elizabeth Luck (grandmother)
Ethel Connelly (aunt)
Evelyn Chamberlain (aunt)
Frederick Luck (brother)
Frederick Luck (uncle)
Harriet Chamberlain (grandmother)
Helen Cockerill (“Nellie”)
Herbert Cockerill
Joseph and Elizabeth Cockerill (great grandparents)
Louisa Cockerill
Mabel Chamberlain (cousin)
Margaret Cockerill
Thomas Cockerill (great uncle)
Walter Cockerill (great uncle)
My mother’s parents were Annie Louisa Luck (born Cockerill), and Charles Henry Luck. Here is the tree for Annie’s family, the Cockerills and Chamberlains,
And here is the tree for the Lucks,
Individuals for whom we have photos are marked with an orange dot. The information for all this comes from my mother’s memory, dates in an old family bible, and a few birth and death certificates. There may be inaccuracies, and it is now impossible to check the information without considerable research.
I will say a little about the family members I knew.
As a child, my mother lived at 13 Saint George Street, Leicester, part of an area swept away in slum clearance after WW2, but I had visited it frequently as a child and have a vivid memory of it. The front door was never used. Access to the back door was through a wooden gate which led into a communal yard for about half a dozen houses. There were washing lines, a mangle, and paths from the back doors to the outside toilets at the other end of the yard. The houses were two up-two down, although I never went up the stairs, and almost never into the front room, cold and never used. My grandmother and uncle Fred lived entirely in the kitchen.
My grandmother, Annie Louisa Luck, I remember as a toothless old lady, bent like a hoop, in a wooden rocking chair. Fred, my uncle, lived with her until she died, first in Saint George Street, then in Halifax Drive, one street away from where I lived as a child at 31 Woodstock Road, Leicester. In Halifax Drive my grandmother still lived in the kitchen in the same chair. My mother regarded my grandmother as a bad parent, neglecting her in childhood and starving her of affection. My mother married hastily a man called Swan, really to escape her mother. Later they were divorced and she married my father.
My uncle Fred was a lifelong bachelor, living first with his mother, then with my mother until his own death. But in his youth he had been something of a ladies’ man, handsome and well dressed. His last years were clouded by senility. He had a reputation (somewhat undeserved) for being the brains of the family. He went to grammar school, in fact the same one I went to — Alderman Newton’s Boys.
Before Fred or my mother was born, there was another child, Edna May, who died in infancy. My mother grew up in the shadow of this child’s memory, who used to be described to her by her mother as a perfect angel.
My mother’s father I never knew. He was a gunner in WW1 (I still have his standard-issue medals in the box and envelope they were mailed in), and my mother’s first memory of him was when she saw him in uniform, on leave, and wondered who he was. After the war he left his wife, and died (I think) when I was very young.
Annie Louisa’s father was Arthur Cockerill who worked in a brewery and was killed in an industrial accident in his twenties. His wife Harriet remarried, and became Harriet Chamberlain. My great aunts Evelyn and Mabel were therefore half-sisters of my grandmother.
Of the Chamberlains, I did once meet Dolly, but otherwise only knew Evelyn and Mabel. Mabel was a timid creature, very much under the control of Evelyn. These two spinster sisters lived together until Mabel died. Mabel had once been proposed to, and turned the proposal down as it would have meant a life abroad, away from her family. (I believe her lover was a missionary.) This missed chance caused her such sorrow she would cry at the memory of it, and I once saw her do this. When young, she had contracted tuberculosis, and the long hospitalization she went through was something she would often happily talk about, this being the only really interesting thing that had ever happened to her. When I visited these aunts, I used to play board games with Mabel of the snakes and ladders sort. I once took with me a chess set (I think I was 11) and tried to teach her the rules, but she could never understand the knight’s move.
Evelyn had been a very merry and lively girl when young, and still had some of those qualities when I knew her, but as she aged she grew vindictive, and fell out with all her relations. She eventually made her will leaving everything to the solicitor who had drawn it up. (A clear impropriety, but this did happen.)
I don’t have pictures of Edith and Arthur Spence unfortunately. Edith Spence was a granddaughter of Joseph Cockerill, my mother a great granddaughter. They became friendly late in life, and the Spences, being childless, left their house to my mother in their will. This was 3 Alexander Avenue, Enderby. Enderby is a village outside Leicester, now almost a suburb. My mother lived there with her brother and her husband (Fred and Fred) until the death of her husband and then her brother, when she moved to Norwich.
A final point: I was often struck by how similar in looks Uncle Fred was to his own father, and how different in looks my mother was to either of them. I once asked my mother if she had ever doubted her own paternity. She was not at all offended or surprised by this question, she said she had, and speculated on her probable father among the neighbours. This however is mere surmise.
My father’s family
Other than my father himself, I have no pictures of any of his family. I rarely saw them, and do not know very much about them. Here is a brief summary.
My father’s mother died suddenly when he was still a boy at school. I believe she was Scottish, and that her maiden name was Wodehouse.
My father, Frederick, was one of four children, the others being Lawrence, Harold and Laura. They all lived in or around Mountsorrel, a village near Leicester. (There were indeed many Porters there. I once saw the War Memorial at Mountsorrel with my father, and he could tell me his connection with the various Porters whose names appeared on it.)
Lawrence was the eldest. He never married, and was seen as the “simpleton” of the family. I was with my father the last time he saw Lawrence in the street. He went up to him and talked to him, but Lawrence did not know who he was until my father explained.
Harold, older than my father, married Harriet, and they had two daughters. These cousins were much older than me, and as a child I was taken to their weddings. Harold was rather deaf, and shouted rather than spoke. Harriet filled her head with strange ideas. My mother, a town dweller, saw all these people as simple rustics.
Laura became Laura Fletcher on marrying. She had two sons, both older than me. The younger had Down’s syndrome.
As a teenager I once pressed my father about what seemed to me a gap in his lifestory, between his schooldays and meeting my mother. He admitted he had been married to someone else. This secrecy was a great shock to me. My mother had openly told me about her first marriage, why had my father kept his secret? But my father was in many ways a very secretive person. Years later, when he was dead, I thought to ask my mother if there had been children, and she said yes, there were two daughters. Later still my mother told me one of the daughters had died. But I had the feeling she was not certain of this. Perhaps unbeknown to me my father kept up some contact with these girls, but there was no sign of that in our family life that I could see. I have therefore two sisters I have never met, and I now rather regret never having tried to find them. It is probably now too late: I am over 70, and I think they were 10 or more years older than me.