The Family Mystery
Over the years I have tried with little success to find out who my grandmother Kitty really was. Kitty spoke very rarely about her childhood, or about her parents, siblings, and grandparents.
She and my grandfather, Harry Smith, were never married, although they said they were! I only suspected that they were never married when my aunt came across a marriage certificate dated 1924 in my grandfather Harry's name, and in the name of an Elsie Maud Tutton. My aunt believed that it proved Kitty was actually Elsie (a name she went by) but I had my doubts as the marriage date was before my father Frank was born. Therefore, there would have been no reason to register Frank in anything other than her married name of Smith.
Frank never had a birth certificate and had been told by his mother that he was registered in her maiden name of Davis. Kitty told Frank that, as she and Harry weren't married, he couldn't be registered in his father's name. That wouldn't make sense if she was married to Harry Smith at the time of Frank's birth.
It was also clear that Smith was not the name my grandfather was born with as his sisters and half siblings were all Jowetts.
So, not just one mystery, but three - who was Kitty? What was my father's real name? Why did Harry change his name to Smith?
And so the search began in earnest.
Sue Barnes,
(formerly Smith)
susanebarnes@yahoo.co.uk
One of the few things Kitty told the family was that she had run away from a Catholic convent in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, when she was 14 years old. She also said that she had a sister who was a nun who spent the last years of her life in Essex. My father, her son Frank, says he took her to see someone she claimed was her sister in the mid to late 1960's although he didn't go in with her. He thought the place he took her to was in Southend on Sea. This could have been somewhere like Nazareth House, a former children's home and, more recently, a care home. Kitty didn't tell Frank anything more about the visit and he didn't ask.
Kitty died 16/1/1984 in Willesden, London, and took her secret to her grave.
So, the mystery of who Kitty Smith really was, where she came from, how she ended up in Islington - more than 300 miles from her home in Barrow-in-Furness - and why she was so reluctant to talk about her former life and family, became important to my father Frank, and to me, and I was determined to uncover the truth!
