Storytelling Sunday - Great Grandma's Headline News

1958 was an eventful year for my mum.  With good news and bad, new arrivals and sad departures.  When going through a box of old photos recently I came across the Parish Magazine for August 1958.  Price 4d.  I found it so interesting to read and see adverts for some shops that I remember from my childhood and even some that are still in business today.  There's a page of handy hints entitled 'Weekday Pages for Women with Homes'.  How to get the creases out of hair ribbons by holding them over the steam of a kettle, and how it is best to buy towels with patterns in squares not lines, much easier and cleaner when washed and boiled apparently! 

Under the Parish Register we see a 'welcome' to a certain little 4 month old, ginger haired baby who was baptised on July 13th (that would be me) and a 'farewell' to my great grandmother in the sympathy section registering her death at the age of 95 on July 23rd.  My mum was born at a time when families were quite a bit larger than the average family nowadays.  So sometimes one or two children would be sent off to live with grandparents and this was the case with my mum and her younger sister.  They were brought up by their grandmother in the countryside and didn't really see too much of their real mother.  When Granny was too old to look after herself, she came to live with my parents where she lived her final days.  It must have been so tough for my mum to have an eight year old daughter, new baby and 95 year old grandmother all needing her care and attention.  Granny was quite the celebrity in the village and I will share the paragraph in the Parish Magazine with you:

'We cannot let the passing of Mrs Butcher go unrecorded in the Parish Magazine, for she was the oldest woman in Harlow, and the much loved mother of a large family well known in the town (for they never got far away), with numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 
Only recently she had been on a visit to Chelmsford, but her last public appearance was on Remembrance Sunday in Coronation year, when she planted a tree on Mulberry Green.  To her numerous relatives we offer our sympathies, especially to those of them who tended her so faithfully for the last years of her long life.'

'Her last public appearance ...' makes her sound like royalty doesn't it? 

This story is shared as part of Sian's Storytelling Sunday, why not pop over there and see what other tales there are to be told this weekend?