Thank you so much for getting in touch, I have been searching for information on Eleanor for 3 years and I thought the trail had gone cold. I am her niece, she had 4 sisters and 1 brother. My cousins of which there are 4 still alive have very scanty knowledge of her visiting and staying with her sister and a telegram which my father received saying she had been taken as a prisoner of war in France. everything else I have pieced together from newspapers, shipping records etc. I have one early photo of her dressed as nurse on a balcony in Paris. Do you remember a nephew visiting her on his way to teach in the Gilbert & Ellis Islands? Apparently he did not have a dinner jacket and I presume you or your father lent him one so that he could accompany the family to a concert. I can well understand why she stayed in America, you were her family and after the war things were very bleak in England, till about the 1960's. Leyland was a manufacturing town and except to see her sisters there would be really no life here to come back to.
A bit about me, I live in Yorkshire and found out that I had living relatives 2 years ago when I found I had a sister and several cousins. My father was Joseph Irving, Eleanor's brother. It has been exciting to be reunited with the Irving clan, my sister is 80 and has thoroughly enjoyed the information we have found out, a new nephew in Japan, gold miners in Australia in 1880's so Eleanor followed a family pattern through the years of leaving England and making a new life abroad.
I would love to hear about her and what she was like. If you are able to scan any photographs in, we don't have any except the one pre-war.
If you reply by personal message, your posting will not be public and I can then give you my email address.
Thank you so much for getting in touch, I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards
Josephine
