The book is called James Brown and appears not to have a credited author.
What has fascinated me and why I know the book to be relatively old (besides its battered condition) is the dated handwritten inscriptions inside the front and rear covers.
The inscription in the front of the book was written in ink...
whilst the inscription in the back was written in pencil
This morning I decided to find out more about the two young writers, Emily Watkinson & Ellen Chinnery by making use of my current subscription to Ancestry. I've been busy over Christmas tidying up my family history research.
Using the second subscription naming Ellen and Maud Chinnery and the date, 1898, as a starting point, I quickly found a 1891 census references to:
Charles Chinnery (29)
Eliza Chinnery (33)
Ellen Chinnery (8)
Maud Chinnery (3)
all born in Belchamp Walter, Essex but living in near-by Belchamp Otten.
Having now the sisters ages, I was able to identify their birth registrations;
Ellen Hannah S A Chinnery Q4 1882
Alice Ethel M Chinnery Q3 1887 ( the M standing for Maud by which she was known as).
Keeping in the general area, Emily Watkinson was born in the Halstead district Q4 1879 and was 11 years of age in the 1891 census, and a boarder with William & Louisa Rule. (She had been with them for much of her life as in the 1881 census, she was with the Rule's aged 1)
How Emily knew Ellen to gift her the book in 1893 in not known. Emily would have been 13 (or possibly just 14) years old when she inscribed the book to Ellen, who would have been 10 years of age. And five years later, Ellen would copy the style of Emily's inscription when she inscribed her own message to her sister Maud, who was also now 10 years of age.
Ussing Ancestry's search facilities,over the course of a few hours, I was able to discover who the three girls were to marry and even the names of their children.
Emily lived until 1965, dying in the Halstead district where she was born 86 years earlier.
Ellen also was to live her life in the Halstead district but passed away at the realtively young age of 51 years in 1934.
I'm still trying to locate Maud's (Alice's) death.
But the icing on the cake of this project was this afternoon when, via Genesreunited, I wa sable to make contact with a lady in Wiltshire who is Ellen Chinnery's granddaughter.
I quickly photographed the book (the shots illustrated on this page) and emailed them to this lady who can now see the writing of the grandmother she never knew, written when her grandmother was just 15 years of age.
Isn't the internet amazing?
