A Valentine's Day post: ancestors in love

Bath Chronicle, 24 February 1763

It's St Valentine's Day, so I'm going to look at a few love stories from my family tree. Happy, sad, or awkward, they remind me that my ancestors and relatives weren't just dates and names on a GEDCOM, they were living, loving, real people with all the ups and downs that go with being human.

Rwgan, our family home in Wales

My father's parents met when my grandfather, Richard Owen, came to board at Rwgan, a Cardiganshire (now Ceredigion) farmhouse our family built in the early 19th century. Richard, the son of Griffith Owen of Anglesey and Elizabeth Richard/s, got a job in Lloyds Bank in the county town, Cardigan, and stayed at Rwgan with Rhys Lloyd and his wife Sarah Davies. Their daughter, Elizabeth Jane (Lizzie) lived there, too, and she was a beauty, small, with a heart-shaped face and long, luscious hair.

Richard was smitten... but Lizzie was choosy, and had turned down previous offers for her hand. One of her unlucky suitors had described her as 'frozen perfume' - I love that phrase! But something about young Mr Owen melted her... and they married and had two sons, my father and uncle.

My other grandfather was Laurence Thomas Delaney, known as Pop. He was the son of Mary Maude Wilson and Thomas Delaney (Tom). This story is about one of Pop's sisters, Florence (Flo) and also involves a paying guest.

Flo at the races, © Frances Owen

Flo was living with her parents at the family farm, Moyne, near Little Hartley in New South Wales. A trader, Robert Reinerts, from Hamburg, stayed at Moyne as a boarder when on leave from his work in New Guinea (presumably the north-eastern part, then under German control).

He and Flo fell in love. But international politics were cruel to them. The First World War broke out and Robert was interned as an enemy alien. After the war ended, Robert was repatriated to Germany.

He asked Flo to marry him, but she couldn't bear the thought of going to live on the other side of the world. So they parted, and she never married.

Her life wasn't empty, though; she loved going to dances with the other young Delaneys and, when the family moved to Sydney, she enjoyed days at the races and evenings at the opera.

One of my convict ancestors, James Thomas Richards (no relation, as far as I know, to the Elizabeth mentioned above), went on being a rogue into his fifties. At some time before May 1870, in Sydney, New South Wales, he met Rebecca Harrington, a free settler from Hackney in East London. You may have read about Rebecca's mother, Julia, in the Celestina Christmas story over on the A Rebel Hand blog.

James was about 25 years older than Rebecca. Who knows what drew them together? Did he represent security? He was a well-known figure on the quayside, and a prizewinning waterman. Maybe she was pretty, vivacious or charming. It could have been their East End backgrounds which gave them something in common.

But all we have are the facts - that on 28 February, 1871, when she was about 30 years old, Rebecca gave birth to James's daughter, Eleanor Ann Edith. The only problem was that James wasn't in a position to marry her - he already had a wife, Elizabeth Beadman.

I haven't got much evidence about how James, Rebecca and Elizabeth dealt with this uncomfortable situation. I do know that when Rebecca's father, Thomas Harrington, died in 1874, he was buried from James's house in Cumberland St, Sydney. Had he, or Rebecca, or both, been living there?

Thomas Harrington's burial notice, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 July, 1874

Elizabeth was still alive, though whether she was living at that address I don't know. Maybe she stayed at her grown-up son James's house. She died later that year, and James Thomas and Rebecca married on 14 October 1874.

Most of my ancestors just met and married (or didn't) without leaving a boy-meets-girl story behind them. I've written about how my earliest Australian ancestors may have got together, and I'll mention them again because 2016 is a bi-centenary year for three of them: Nicholas Delaney, who married Elizabeth Bayly (Bayley, Bailey), and Sarah Marshall and John Simpson, who probably didn't go through a ceremony but were 'married' as far as they were concerned.


Do you know any love stories which bring your ancestors to life?


I'm going to finish with a few Valentine notices I found in the British Newspaper Archive. I hope you enjoy them!

Plymouth Gazette, 15 February 1845. A cynical view...

Worcester Journal, 4 February 1854

Burnley Gazette, 19 February 1876. Sale of unwanted cards?

Burnley Gazette, 26 March 1881. A bit desperate?

'Offensive vulgarity' in 1926. Who knew they'd gone out of fashion?

Surrey Advertiser, 10 February 1940. The war can't stop love (or commerce). Take that, Hitler!

I Trove you, my Valentine

It's St Valentine's Day!* The perfect day to talk about love. But where to start?

A light-hearted post about Valentines in the past seems like a good idea. So I've been looking at Trove Australia, the National Library of Australia's wonderful searchable database of historical newspapers and much more.

I wondered when the earliest mention of a Valentine was published in an Australian newspaper. It turned out to be on Friday 18 February 1825, four days late, and it's not a very cheerful message.

The poem, in the Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, states that

It calls itself a Valentine,
But call it what you will.

It goes on:

With me thy love's a wither'd joy,
And vain thy beauty now!

And the ex-lover finishes:

And friendship take the place of love,
To send a Valentine.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be thrilled to get a poem about withered joy and vain beauty.

And I'm not convinced that it's a very friendly message, either.

But then again, this wasn't a Valentine sent to anyone in particular, just (it seems) an editorial whim.

In those days Valentine cards were hugely popular, it seems, looking at the tongue-in-cheek reports in the Aussie newspapers.

The Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser of Friday 15 February 1839 says: 

Yesterday being Valentine's Day, the Sydney lads and lasses were interchanging "hearts and darts, and true lover's knots," from daylight to dark.

I'm guessing that the people who got the Valentines still had to pay the postie tuppence, since the prepaid, stamped (that's where the word comes from) sheets which were introduced the year before might not have been as well received as romantic cards. It must have cost the popular 'Sydney lads and lasses' quite a bit.

On Saturday 9 February 1867, the Australasian writes a long 'Ladies' Column' about Valentine cards in Melbourne:

Once again the day approaches when custom sanctions style and manner of epistolary communication between the sexes which, at any other period of the year, would scarcely be tolerated. Our stationers' windows teem with specimens, of orthodox applicability to every conceivable case of love-sickness, from the incipient flutter of dawning preference to that over-head-and-heels condition into which the wisest of men and women-are prone to tumble.

The article's too long to reproduce in this post, but you can see it all here.

Valentine messages in the personal columns of newspapers didn't start until 1976, when the Canberra Times published a modest How Sweet It Is A Valentine Greeting section among its other small ads on 14 February. There's a typical message, pet names and all: 

SWEETIE all my love as always, today and forever. Chicken.

(Cute!) And a more, um, unusual one:

 
SHAME Lizzie is not for borrowing. Slim. Hmm.

When was the last Valentine message printed in the Aussie small ads? I wondered. It was 1995, in the Canberra Times, which seems to have had a monopoly on them.

By this date it took me a while to weed out all the adverts for Valentine's gifts (and, ahem, an 'adult' shop), but there's a half-page of messages of love.

Some of them are very moving, like one from Clare to Stephen: "I love you. Your eternal love, best friend, and wife forever."

Some are funny: "Gomez - keep the slab cold for me. Morticia."

There are plenty of pet names - Huckles, Honey Bear, Grunt, Snort ands Snuggle Bunny.

But how to pick the 'last ever' Valentine in the newspapers? I've gone for the one in the picture. It's near the end, it mentions being someone's Valentine, and it's lovely.

I wonder why Valentine messages in newspapers stopped after 1995. It's not as if people had Facebook, Twitter, Google+, text messages and so on like we have now. Maybe they just didn't bring in enough money to the paper? What do you think?

To finish my Trove Valentines, here's an unusual one. Unusual not just because of the words, but because of when it was published - on Saturday 19 May 1866.

Here it is, from the South Australian Weekly Chronicle, and you can find his sweetheart's answer to the farmer printed underneath if you click on the link.

What do you think she said?

Well, a wooing with milking cows, swine, pudding, beef and up-the-chimney bacon - who could resist?



Methodology:
I searched Trove for 'Valentine', which brought up a lot of first names and surnames, so I searched for 'my Valentine'. You can see a QueryPic graph (a wonderful tool developed by Tim Sherratt of WraggeLabs) showing the number or proportion of mentions here. 'My Valentine' peaks in 1918.

Then I searched for 'Valentine's Day' and based this post on the results of this search and the one for 'my Valentine'. Here's a comparison of 'My Valentine' and 'Valentines Day' (QueryPic doesn't allow apostrophes). The number of uses of both phrases dropped during both World Wars, though they both had all-time peaks in 1918.

I then searched for some phrases I thought people might use: 'I love you', 'my darling' and 'my love'. On the QueryPic you'll see a big peak at the time of the First World War, which is an interesting contrast with the use of 'Valentine'. Perhaps the day mattered less, during those terrible times, than the message. The data for the Second World War are much less clear.

* I was all set to post this on the 14th, my usual day. Then - oh no! My laptop went loopy. So it's a day late - sorry!

For images of vintage Valentines, try History of the Valentine and Wikimedia Commons.