From the City…

This is one of the older photos that I have.  But I don’t really ‘have’ it.  All I have is this scan of a copy of a photo that was printed in a book from around 1980.  It’s great to have that much because despite it being a copy of a copy (of a copy?), there are still some interesting details in it.  It’s from Edith Keys Segraves’ book “Cook-Keys Family: Two Centuries in England and America.”  One of these days I’m going to track down some of those old photos, get a good scan of them, retouch them, and share them with everyone.  Til then, this is what you get!

The year is around 1880 or so.  The country is England.  The family is the the Cookie family.  Not really.  That’s the name I think of when I read the title of Edith Segraves’ book.  But the Cook-Keys connection started here.  At least for our family.  When our ancestors Henry Keys married Martha Cook on Nov. 8, 1869, the Cook-Keys connection had already been started eight years earlier.

Martha’s sister Henrietta had married Henry’s brother William in 1861 and they had eight children together.  Henry and Martha had five children by 1881 – Henry Alfred, Leonard, Daisy, Ruth, and Mabel.  From the few examples I’ve seen, I would assume that these two families would have been close.  All of their kids had the same grandparents, were double first cousins, and probably looked similar.  And Martha and Henrietta were the only two children in the Cook family.  Their father had died in 1840 when Martha was three years old and Henrietta was six months old, so that would likely have made them closer as well.

Yet that didn’t keep them together.  When Martha’s husband Henry died in 1886, it wasn’t but a year later that she moved herself and her five young children to America.  To be accurate, Martha didn’t break the families apart.  One of Henrietta’s sons was already living in Delaware County, Iowa, at that time. (Funnily enough, the Bucklin family had lived in that same county earlier in the 1880s.  A generation later, the Bucklin and Keys families connected as well.)  And I’ve mentioned before that Martha’s uncle William Horsnell had recently moved from Iowa to the exotic locales of southern Louisiana.

Look at that photo again.  It looks like a pretty nice place to live.  Nice sturdy buildings and a charming little side patio enclosed with an iron fence.  It was a civilized place to live.  They had venetian blinds in the window!  If that doesn’t say civilized, I don’t know what does!  But Martha had heard of some criminal activities in nearby areas and decided it was time to move on.  So in June of 1887, she brought her children to London during the week of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and on the 27th boarded them onto the ship Aurania heading for the New World.