Yes ... and there are some really moving stories in there, too. Like my great great grandmother Emily Cass Stephenson (nee Holcomb). She was born in the East End of London in 1860. Her father died when she was 7. Her mother went into service in a village just outside Newmarket (where she had grown up) and Emily and her sister were sent to live with their grandparents (one with each pair).
Emily went to live with Ambrose and Sarah Frost at the Swan Inn in Exning. Her grandfather Ambrose died when she was 9, and her grandmother Sarah when she was 15. She then joined her sister living with her other grandparents, Anthony and Martha Holcomb, in Chippenham (not the one in Wiltshire, but another village to the North of Newmarket). Two years later, Martha Holcomb died too (Anthony, however, was to live for another 30 years, and didn't die until he was 98 and a great great grandfather!!)
In 1883 Emily became pregnant to Charles James Christopher Stephenson, the son of a Newmarket baker. She went to London and became a barmaid at an inn in Camberwell, and it is here that her daughter Myrah Cass Stephenson Holcomb was born. She then married Myrah's father (in Hendon, for some reason ... still a bit of detective work to do to figure out why) and they returned to the Newmarket area, taking a pub in a village South of Newmarket where they were licensed victuallers and bakers (each, no doubt, contributing their own particular expertise to the venture). The young Myrah Cass Stephenson Holcomb simply dropped the "Holcomb" family name after her parents were married. If asked, her parents could truthfully say that she had ALWAYS been called Myrah Cass Stephenson (the truth and nothing but the truth ... just not the whole truth) thereby concealing the illegitimacy (and also, I should say, making it a devil of a job to piece this one together: in both of her childhood censuses Myrah is somewhere other than with her parents, and is listed as May not Myrah. They don't always make it easy for us, do they?)
Myrah in due course married my great grandfather Frank Whitney Hardwick, and in due course my own mother was named Myra (but without the ~h) after her grandmother.
I really feel for my great great grandma Emily. I think she had a tough time. But I also sense ... although I cannot really explain why ... that for all that, she was happy in life!
