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The People and Places in the Bartholomew Album

This album was created by Luther Foreman for his mother, born Eliza Bartholomew, in 1910. He must (famous word) have put together a collection of photos that his family already possessed. The interesting thing is that the photos are mostly about Bartholomews and notably that a very early picture shows Mary Ann, née Seal, Bartholomew with two of her children. I am drawn to thinking that Mary Ann was the first photographic enthusiast of the family and that she communicated this enthusiasm to her children and their families. Certainly Mary Ann's husband, William, does not appear and probably refused to have anything to do with the new fangled fashion.

The children with families were Sarah and Eliza. Mary Ann's eldest daughter Martha appears in but one photograph, probably near the end of her short life.

Mary Ann lived with her family in Newmarket where her husband William was ostler to The Star inn, Newmarket. Newmarket was a horse racing town and this can be seen in some of the small people, jockeys I guess, in the photos and other references to nags. By 1871 he had his own pub in nearby Ashley where both he and Mary Ann died, about six months apart, in 1885.

Sarah married the then William Reginald Lybbe Powys in 1880 in Boulogne where William had been living with his first wife whose mother and sister also lived nearby. This first wife died at the end of 1879; I speculate that she had been pregnant and Sarah was hired from England to be the nurse to the expected baby (no evidence of course but Sarah had been a child's nurse in 1871). From his marriage to his first wife William had used various surnames of Lybbe, Powys, Lybbe Powys and Lybbe-Powys at the time of the birth of Reginald. In July 1882 William and Sarah had moved to Tunbridge Wells and he changed his proper name from Powys to Powys-Lybbe, following a rapprochement with his father who had got a Royal Licence to change his name to "Powys Lybbe" in 1862 (long story, see elsewhere). William and Sarah's only daughter Olga Mary was born there a couple of months later with that surname. Sarah and William's second son Richard was born in Tunbridge Wells in 1884 and soon after that the family moved to Wallingford, where William had been left some property by a relation of his mother and of which town he almost immediately became mayor. In 1886 their third son was born in Wallingford, and in 1888 William died in office. The widowed Sarah then married Dr Charles Wright Edwards in 1889 and in 1891 she and Charles with her four children were living in Burghfield near Newbury and soon after that they all moved to Woodstock Oxon where Sarah died in 1895. Her four orphaned children then went to a Powys aunt in Nether Wallop, Hants.

Sarah and her children only feature in photographs up to her first husband's death though there is one photograph of her second husband.

The other family that appears is that of Mary Ann Bartholomew's youngest daughter Eliza who married Luther Pattle Foreman who was a successful builder in Newmarket. They had five children of whom only three survived in 1911: Isabella, Montague and Ivy. They lived in Newmarket until at least 1911 and later moved to Chelmsford Essex.

The album was inherited by Lancelot Claude Foreman presumably from his father Montague. The greatest interest in it had been taken by Derek Elliott, husband of Thelma Pearl Burrell who was a great-granddaughter of Mary Ann, and it was Derek who made contact with me. After Derek's death Lancelot decided that there were more P-L photographs in the album than any other of Mary Ann's descendants and thought I should be its custodian. I then thought that some of the photos needed expert treatment so got them scanned and adjusted and it is the result of this process that you now have before you.

None of Mary Ann's four sons had any children that I have been able to find.

A complaint: Montague Foreman did not include the names of the people in his album. So we have little or no idea who a quarter or so of the photos are about. Someone entered some faint speculations beside some photos, but I know that some of those were wrong - from other family photographs I possess. Can someone enforce a law that photos MUST be put in albums and the person doing this MUST add in the margin the names of the people in each photo.

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