Oranges and home-made cake

I thought that it was only available until yesterday but I still seem to be able to search the 1939 register on ancestry.co.uk. The register was taken at the onset of WW2 and is such a brilliant resource for family historians.

We’ve really enjoyed looking for our ancestors on this record- we haven’t made any marvellous discoveries or found any long lost siblings, but it has been nice to see our known ancestors with their families and see what jobs they were up to.

It was lovely (and also a bit sad) to see my grandmother, her sister and their father (my great grandfather Herbert Skilling) in their home in Haslingden, Lancashire. I looked it up on google maps and it’s a small terraced house (probably two up, two down).

My great grandad was very ill by that time, and the record notes that he was incapacitated by sickness. He died four months after this register was taken, five months into the war. He was only 58. I ordered his death certificate many years ago which gave his cause of death as Neurasthenia- which is really depression/anxiety/nervous exhaustion. It’s sad to think of Herbert feeling that way at the end of his life. There is a family story, which we now have no way of ratifying as there is no one left alive, that Herbert would only eat oranges in the final days (weeks?) of his life.

He fought in WW1 at Ypres and saw much sadness in his life. He also was a highly engaged and hardworking citizen of his town. He was a local labour councillor and a cotton weaver in one of the local mills. His obituary said he could be ‘argumentative’ in council discussions and in every photo we have of him with his two daughters he looks every bit the loving father.

His daughters, my Granny Betty and Great Aunt Elsie (both of whom I never met) have their professions listed in the 1939 record too. Betty was a confectioner; my Dad told me that she had run a little cake shop in Rishton but had given this up before her marriage to my grandad. Aunty Elsie is listed as a dispenser in a doctor’s private practice which is a job she continued for her whole working life.

There’s a lovely bit of extra info which is that Elsie was a first aid volunteer for the ARP (Air Raid Precautions).

How l would love to meet these people one day. Listen to my great grandfather’s stories and sit down to some home-made cake with my Granny.