LiveTheirStory

In my post about Alexander Nash, I came across Florence Seward, born in Chatteris but living, in 1891, in Moreton, Essex with her widowed and aged aunt Susannah Rippon. So how did she come to be there?

The Sewards were (and are) a well-known family in Chatteris, and Florence’s paternal grandfather William farmed a substantial plot, employing a number of men. Her father, also named William, did not stay in the locality, however. He married Sarah Rippon, from Lincolnshire, and the 1881 census finds them living in Epperstone, a village outside Nottingham, with Florence, her four brothers and two sisters, and Sarah’s mother Susannah. This record reveals that Susannah was in fact Florence’s maternal grandmother, not her aunt. William gives his occupation as a farm bailiff, but was presently out of work. With 7 children to support, this may have been the catalyst for Susannah to move out and take Florence with her, perhaps as a live-in companion.

Whilst their story finds grandmother and granddaughter in Essex in 1891, claiming ‘own means’ but possibly being supported by their Rippon kin (the Moreton village millers) William, Sarah and their three youngest children are next documented in 1891 living in Sheffield, the two boys already working as a grocer’s assistant and errand boy at the ages of 14 and 12, and their father as a labourer.

Susannah’s death in 1892 precipitated another move for Florence, and 1901 sees her back with her parents, but William had moved on again. Now he is listed as a dealer selling poultry, eggs and cream around the streets of south Manchester, where he, his wife and four of their adult children now lived. Although her younger siblings were working as a dyer’s salesman and a waitress, neither Florence nor her older brother Charles gives an occupation. Charles is described as ‘paralysed’, but did Florence also have some disabling condition that is not recorded.

Ten years later, William had died, but Florence remained with her mother and three other siblings in Manchester. The census entry still omits any occupation for her. Beyond 1911 there are no census entries for Florence, and further research reveals that she died in 1913, aged just 39. She was laid to rest with her father and brother Charles (who had died in 1908) in Manchester’s South Cemetery, all of them a long way from home.