Where I Came From

On Saturday, Mum took me up to Tottenham cemetery, to see the grave of my greatgrandparents, Thomas and Ellen Carr, both of who died in 1935. One of their daughters, Gladys, is also buried in the same plot.




I can honestly say I don't think I've ever visited a family grave before, or at least not that I can remember. It was very humbling to think that, beneath my feet (or at least beneath the granite grave marker), lay the bones of people without whom I wouldn't be here now. It was a most peculiar feeling. I'm trying not to dwell on the fact that the three coffins will of course have rotted away into nothing by now, and that there will just be a jumble of bone left, if that.



So, the picture above is of Thomas and Ellen, at the wedding of their daughter Phyllis (my Grandma) in August 1930. The bridesmaid on the left is Joyce, who was Gladys' daughter, aged around 13 at the time.

Anyway, the grave is under a tree in a quiet part of the cemetery. It looked like a lot of the graves in that area were also from 1935. Unfortunately quite a lot of them look unsafe, and you can see where they have sunk slightly and started to tip backwards. We cleaned the grave up a bit (there were some twigs and dead leaves etc).

This has all only left me with an insatiable need to find out where other members of the family are buried. It's not so much that I feel the need to visit ... just that I want to know where they are. I have been wondering if Thomas and Ellen would ever have given any thought to what would happen after they'd gone - whether anyone would visit their graves etc. Mum said that she cannot recall Grandma ever visiting their graves (that's not to say that she didn't) - but then again she was vastly unsentimental, and probably didn't feel the need. Would they ever have thought that 70+ years down the line, their granddaughter (Mum was born in 1936, so she never knew her grandparents) would embark on a quest to find them, and would then take one of their greatgranddaughters (ie me) to visit them? I am sure they would be pleased that they have not been forgotten.

Which of course brings me back to the graves of other family members. Nellie, Thomas and Ellen 's eldest daughter, died aged 15 in Hornchurch (I believe she was in a sanitorium) from rheumatic heart disease in 1902. We haven't been able to find her. We're not sure if she was buried in Hornchurch, or in London. At the time the family were living in Stoke Newington, and the cemetery in Stoke Newington is one of the only (so it would appear) cemeteries that has an online list of the people buried there, and I can't find Nellie on there so can only surmise that she isn't there. I have emailed the parish church in Hornchurch to see if they can find out for me if their cemetery is her final resting place.

Then we come to Frank. He was Thomas and Ellen's youngest son, who died in 1929 from flu, at the age of 35. We don't know where he is either. It makes me sad. All I have of these people is a few photographs. How I wish I had a time machine.