Today, I went to visit my great-grandparents - on my father's side - William and Sarah (née Ayton) Barber. That is - these were my father's mother's parents. I was very grateful that municipal cemetery records meant that I could locate their grave, because it's very modest - no engraved tombstone here. The edging looks suspiciously like the edging that you'd put round flowerbeds.
This is in Brandwood End cemetery, King's Heath, Birmingham - about twenty five minutes' walk from where my father, and his brother and mother and aunt, lived with Grandpa and Grandma Barber from around 1932, when my father would have been 10, to ... well, I remember visiting the house around 1960, when Gran - my father's mother, that is - still lived there. Grandpa Barber was a veteran of the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian war, and subsequently joined the Railway Police: they lived all over the place (Sheffield, Leeds, Derby ...) before finally settling in B'ham.
Brandwood End is a truly magnificent piece of late Victorian architecture: the design for these two memorial chapels - mirror images of each other - are by John Boulton Brewin Holmes, from 1899. They're now pretty much derelict, and appear in Most Endangered Victorian Buildings lists ...
... and there are some magnificent tombs, there.
But the Barber resting place isn't one of them. And I, their great grandaughter, whom they never knew (William died at the very end of 1935; Sarah in June 1947 - her middle name, Jennett, lives on in my own middle name, Jennet. Why isn't it spelt the same way? When I asked my father, he said "because your mother always had to be different," but that won't do: I suspect the registrar couldn't spell) - I, their granddaughter, am spending the night in Leamington Spa, at the kind of under-stated country house hotel that they couldn't have imagined, or imagined staying at, in their wildest dreams. There's a research element to Leamington Spa, tomorrow, to be sure - but it's not one that has anything to do with family history ...
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