It is odd, isn't it? With that amount at probate, unlikely to be servants. (But if servants, first name would be understood. Both a good friend and I have stories of relations in service being given alternative names to their baptismal ones as the employers felt those names to be au dessus de sa gare (ghastly Franglais pun probably not appreciated in the Amities Francaises, which I now suspect to have been a purely local group), and the names given were, in both cases, Mary. Obviously not Catholics.) I think I might have to go back and access the electoral rolls backwards to see when Miss Fenn (I really don't feel comfortable with Ada) arrived at 31, and when the Blessleys turned up. I suppose one possibility is that they were the people she was in France with.
Hang on, probably no use with regard to Miss Fenn as she would not have been eligible for the roll before 1929, because she would not have been old enough. She would have been going to become eligible by virtue of age in the same year that she would have become eligible younger by law. I wonder if the card is a reference to that coming of full citizenship in a jokey way, if references had been made in the household. Picture of a little girl being code for not being a little girl politically any more. (I personally would have felt rather cheated by that - I did, by the changes from 21 to 18, which meant I only had one vote before the younger people did without waiting.)
Would it be a good idea to access forwards as well, to get the war years? The rolls are a bit of a pain - the more recent ones have street indices as to which section to look in, the earlier ones do not, and they keep changing the area codes, so having found it once, there's no use using the same code in another book. I hope the librarians will let me get them out of the cupboards myself, so as not to bother them too much.
Odd Mary Ann Blessley being at a different address for probate with William still at 31 Cheriton Gardens. Presumably a nursing home wouldn't be given as the address for probate, would it? It's just round the corner, anyway. And they obviously aren't husband and wife.
