The Danson Family in a Shoebox - 52 Ancestors: Week 1.

 "Beginnings" is the first  theme of Amy Johnson Crow's year-long challenge "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2021" .  I have opted to look back at what started me off on such an engrossing hobby  as family history.

The pleasure  I have had from Family History began at a young age, with history being my favourite subject at school.   In a cupboard by the fireplace in my grandfather's house in Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool, Lancashire  was an old shoe-box full of family photographs.  It was a great treat if I was allowed to look through them. 

The one picture that attracted my best attention was a striking one of my great grandmother Maria Danson, nee Rawcliffe (1859-1919) and I wanted to know more about her and her large family. 

 

Maria with her young orphaned granddaughter Annie,Maria Danson, c.1917. 

To me Maria’s  name was an evocative mixture of down-to-earth Lancashire grit with echoes of a more flamboyant Latin nature. She looked a formidable lady from this one photograph I had initially of her. To give additional colour there was a, no doubt,  apocryphal,  story that “granny’s dark looks” came from Spanish descent, after an Armada ship had been wrecked off the Fylde coast of Lancashire. All this captured my imagination.

 

The findings in the actual research were much more prosaic.  Maria was born in Hambleton, near Poulton-le-Fylde in 1859, one  of eight  daughters of Robert Rawcliffe (an agricultural labourer and carter)  and Jane Carr.  By comparison, her sisters had much more ordinary names - Anne, Jane, Margaret, Jennet, Alice, Peggy and Martha, with Margaret, Peggy and Martha not surviving infancy.   At 18 years of age in 1877,  Maria married James Danson at Singleton and went on to have ten sons,  before the birth of her only daughter Jennie in 1897, with two dying as babies.

One coincidence delighted me.  I sent away for her birth certificate, and was over the moon to discover she shared her birthday - 15th January - with my own daughter.  Maria's great great granddaughter, born 114 years later.  -   This had to mean something special!

As for the Spanish Armada story, a local history of Hambleton told of an incident in 1643 at the time of the English Civil War. A Spanish frigate, the Santa Anna ran aground in the River Wyre estuary. The crew were taken off the ship, which was set alight to prevent it falling into the hands of the Roundheads. No efforts were made to get the crew home with several  marrying  locally. I rather liked the idea that I might have  some Spanish blood in me after all!  Unfortunately my recent DNA results failed to mention any such ethnicity!

  

Also in the shoe-box was a large collection of  First World War embroidered cards, sent back by my grandfather to his family. This card from Flanders on 8th August 1917 to my mother  at 2 Bull Street, Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire. reads:

  "Dear Kathleen, I am sending you a card and hope you like it.  I am in the pink.  Look after mother and baby.  From your Dad.

Grandad, William Danson was one of eight surviving brothers, five of whom served in the army,  and photographs  of the family were also in the shoe-box.  I was particularly  struck by the  youngest son George Danson who was killed on the Somme in 1916, aged just 22, with his name remembered on Poulton War Memorial  - along with his widowed brother John who died in army training in 1917 – his daughter Annie is the little girl in the first photographin this post.

George Danson (1894-1916)

Maria is at the heart of my family history,   with this shoe-box of memorabilia  providing me with the basis of so many family stories,  for the time many years later  when I came to write profiles and then started my blog.  

Today family history is my main hobby, delving also into my father’s ancestry and my husband’s.  Where would  be in this period of Lockdown without it!   

And  it all began with this shoe-box at my grandfather's house.  

 

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