Wedding Wednesday - A Good Catch!

Louisa Beardsall Baillon (centre) in the 1920s

Louisa Baillon cuts a grand - if slightly incongruous - figure in this picture from the 1920s, in which everyone else is dressed for the sun.

By all reports, Louisa was rather grand!

She had made a "good" marriage - a very good marriage - for in 1878 aged 21, she wed Andrew Edward Louis Baillon, the eldest son of a successful Nottingham lace manufacturer.

Mystery Monday - "Are you going out, father?"

Ellen Milton Palethorpe daughter of
Arthur Milton & cousin of novelist
D.H.Lawrence

As Aaron Sisson left his house on Christmas Eve his daughter Millicent called after him "You won't forget our candles, will you?".  It was the last time that Millicent would see her father.  He was meant to be going out to buy final decorations for the tree they had just decorated and to play his piccolo for Christmas carols at the pub in the Nottinghamshire mining village in which he lived. He didn't return and Millicent, her sister and mother never discovered what happened to him.

According to novelist D.H.Lawrence, Aaron left his wife and children that cold Christmas Eve in a search for freedom that took him first to London and then across Europe to Italy and finally Florence.  Lawrence, had no further interest in  Millicent and her sister but I find the story of the two little girls deserted by their father on Christmas night heart rending.