Family circles?

Ah, I was so enthralled by the novelty of snow which actually settled that I forgot yesterday's anniversary - my g-g-grandparents marriage in 1847 in Doddington, near March. Freeman Quince (1815-1873) was a Benwick boy who went off to be a soldier in the Grenadier Guards and came back to work in the fields; Lydia Burrows (1811-1867) was born in Manea and was quite late marrying (for the time). She'd already produced a son and a daughter, Henry & Jane, and by 1851 all four of them (Freeman, Lydia and her two) were in the North Witchford Union workhouse in Doddington. Interestingly, Lydia and Emma (by then 5 years old) are there again in 1871 but Freeman, husband and father, is living a few miles away in Chatteris!

Doing this blog is certainly educating me - I had completely forgotten this little fact (so much so that I've just checked it again) and now I wonder about it anew. I don't know much about workhouses, other than the shame it usually engendered, so I don't know how a man could leave his family in there whilst he went off to work. Any clues, anybody??

Emma, my g-grandmother, was the second child of Freeman & Lydia with the same name but her sister only lived for about 18mths. Of Lydia's two elder children, I traced Henry to the cotton mills of Lancashire and his sister Jane as far as her marriage to Thomas Welfare in 1862.

Birthday of the day is Frances Eliza Kington Culpin, my g-g-aunt, in Hemingford Abbots, Hunts, in 1838. She made two appearances in the 1841 census and went on to marry William Floyd in St Ives in 1858. Bit of a coincidence here, William was the Master of the Sedgely, Staffs, Workhouse School in 1861 - all riveting stuff, I'm sure you'll agree! He died in 1869 in Staines, after he & Eliza had begat six children; and just to round off this entry with a certain symmetry - Eliza went on to have two more children after his death!!

Oh, and not to miss the anniversary - Buddy Holly died 50 years ago today. The day the music died???