Tales from the Tin: Birth Certificates

For decades, the four children of John and Jenny Bounds have known of the family strong box, a locked metal box the size of a shoe box that was hidden in the bottom of our parents’ wardrobe. It doesn’t have all of the family treasures and documents, but some interesting things are in there; and as I catalogue and scan my way through the tin, it’s clear that mum’s organising genius (a career as a librarian will do that!) has been at work. In envelopes carefully labelled and sorted are the documents that identify members of the family to governments in two countries, or tell stories of journeys and relationships across the decades: indeed, across three centuries.

I want to tell the stories of some of these documents, and other photos and relics of our family, and put them in a context as far as I am able, drawing on anecdote and family tradition. It’s from story that we can draw history, and family history provides a sense of place and identity that is not unimportant in understanding the past and the present.

Birth Certificates

I love these English Birth Certificates (are they different in Scotland, I wonder?) and I have one myself. They are little snapshots of a lost world, but not so lost that we can’t learn a lot from them. Mum was born in Budleigh Salterton, and at some spiritual level she never left. I still haven’t worked out exactly when the Penberthy’s arrived in Devon, and when Ed and Blodwen moved to Moor Lane in Exeter, but Mum lived in Budleigh throughout the war, so I think they must have moved from the village around about the time Mum did the 11-plus and started secondary school. More on that some other time.

Mum was born at home, which was usual, and you can use Maps or Google to see where the Penberthys lived: the house is still on the edge of the village, about ten minutes from the beach. We have all heard stories from her childhood, with descriptions of the beach front in wartime, mined and wired except for a short space of pebbles in front of the villas. The Royal Marines were on the headlands to the west, where the holiday park is now, and the Americans must have been down towards the Otter (something to check). Mum called them combat engineers and thought they had headed off to Omaha Beach; but mostly she remembers them providing the local kids with fresh fruit and treats, something special in a tightly-rationed Great Britain.

The other interesting thing about Mum’s birth certificate is the date. Yes, it’s her birthday, but in 1934, Ella Blodwen would have been nearly 37, old for a first time mother in a rural village. I don’t know if anyone knows the rest of the story, but Mum grew up as an only child in a village (or town?) that was mostly a Victorian sea-side resort.

I’ve still to find out more about Mum’s childhood, but because she wasn’t a photographer, there seems to be much less in the way of pictorial information than about Dad’s side; and very little in the way of letters so far. And she told us less than I thought about Budleigh—for instance, the town was bombed in 1942 by a hit and run raider and the church damaged, but I never heard her talk about that.

So if you know more, add it to the comments!