The Lady in the Locket

"That's Aunt Lizzie!" my father announced as he gave me the engraved silver locket. I opened it and there she was sitting in a Victorian pose, stoically still for the film's long exposure. The family remarked on the likeness my elder sister bore to the subject of the monochrome miniature, - which didn't seem to please my sister at the time! Not one of us thought to ask for more about Aunt Lizzie - and that was over fifty years ago.

Recently, researching my Family History, I felt that I owed it to Aunt Lizzie to discover exactly who she was.

The locket must surely have belonged to my paternal English grandmother, who had died shortly before my birth. Emma Sophia (pronounced So-fire) was the daughter of William Spencer of the Royal Artillery and, for that reason, had been born at The Citadel in Plymouth, Devon. I then applied-for and received a copy of the 1894 certificate of her marriage in London to William Marr Stephen (born in Banffshire). I admired the beautiful signatures and then noted the witnesses, - one Daniel Gammack and...........Eliza Kate Spencer, my grandmother's sister, - my father's Aunt Lizzie!

Eliza Kate was born in 1866 in Woolwich where her father was stationed at The Arsenal. When his regiment was posted to India his family went with him, his wife Emma and their two small daughters. They would have most certainly been there in 1871 when they do not appear in the English census of that year. I can only surmise what befell the family in India as, by 1881 William Spencer was not only an RA pensioner but a widower at the age of forty-two. He and Eliza Kate, aged fifteen, were living at 247 Grays Inn Road, Pancras, London.

Ten years later William Spencer is at Ansty Barracks in Tisbury, South Wiltshire but I have been unable to find Eliza Kate in 1891. On the 25th July that year her father married for the second time. The bride's name was Angelina Theresa Ball and she and William produced his second family, - William, Rose Ann, Walter and the youngest Louisa born in 1898. Half-siblings to Eliza Kate and my grandmother - of their existance I had previously known nothing.

In 1899 Eliza Kate was in Leicestershire where, on the 4th December she married Frederick Bushnell, the 27-year-old son of a miller, born in Oxfordshire. Frederick was butler at Launde Abbey and Eliza Kate's address was given as 123 Lavender Sweep, Clapham, London. Their daughter Nora Emma was born in Chelsea in 1900. A year later the Bushnells were living in Friend Lane in the village of Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire. Eliza Kate and Frederick's son Frederick Bertram Busnell was born there in 1902 and their third child Elsie Mabel was born in Norfolk in the district of Downham two years later.

The last written record I have of Eliza Kate is dated 20th Spetember 1928 where her name appears on a list of beneficiaries of her aunt Martha Spencer. ' Eliza Kate Spencer (now Mrs Bushnell) address 38 Block L, Sutton Estate, Cole Street, Chelsea SW3. Her sister, my grandmother was recorded as living at Foggieloan, 33 Sheringham Ave, Annerley, London SE20, the house where I would be born seven years later.