Work in progress
It’s taken a while, and quite a lot of “research”, but I’m finally done with v1 of Heather’s family. Far too many of the Sharpes are called James, and if not, Thomas. So the three key men in the family line-up are James, James and James. What a relief that their wives are Harriet, Amelia…
Previous | Contents | Next James (Sonny) After Angus was demobilised he went to work for Sonny, and to begin with business was good. “Heather was just born and things were going well,” Angus writes, “when for some reason Sonny decided to sell up and buy another place in the Balham markets”. This was much closer to the…
Previous | Contents | Next Wartime service Angus’s first job was in a drawing office with a heating and ventilation engineer in Kingsway, London, but after some eighteen months he decided to join the Royal Air Force. “This was accomplished by buying six months extra National Health Stamps to falsely increase my age, and after a medical…
Previous | Contents | Next I’m not an artist — can’t brush a stroke, can’t play a note, can’t pass informed judgment — but I love the seemingly easy, romantic nature of James Sharpe’s work. In our own home what we have of his work is fairly meagre, just three framed prints — The Mask, the Scots girl…
Previous | Contents | Next Well, I hate to nit-pick, but if I could I’d ask Uncle Angus about his timeline — because as far as I can see James was well set up in London, and married to a Londoner, well before the war. § § Those were my first impressions of Heather’s grandfather. As Douglas said,…
Previous | Contents | Next After that peculiar yet vivid memory of meeting his grandfather in the “wee Turkish hat” as a three year old, Angus’s next memory was when he was six — “making scooters and riding the South London roads with brother Douglas and friends”. His brother James (“Sonny” from now on) gave…
I had to dip my toe in the water sooner or later, so here goes with Heather’s family. I wanted to start with her mother’s side, about whom we know very little — nothing in writing and very few photos — because Joyce hardly mentioned her parents. Next, move on to Amelia Gartmann’s family —…
Previous | Contents | Next James Grossart Sharp (1848-1928) and Margaret Linklater (1853-1911) Heather’s great-grandparents. As I worked my way down through the generations I kept wondering what the distaff side brought to the mix. What did Agnes Mitchell and Isabel Dall contribute, back in the first half of the 18th Century? Janet Grosart’s family…
Previous | Contents | Next Family history is easy today compared with even 20 years ago, when Heather got to know the helpful archivist in the Stirling library. People drew family trees by hand that I can barely conceive how to lay out now. But it’s still a tedious business, and it’s hard, as I’ve…
Contents § Names — How do you differentiate between a whole lot of Sharpes named “James”? When Thomas and Mary Sharp’s son was born in 1848 they named him James Grossart, and I’ll stick with that. His son, Heather’s grandfather, gets to be James. James’s son will be Sonny, and his son, my brother-in-law, will…