1 The Weekly Writing Challenge this week is too good for me to pass up! It requires us to write about our favourite things and since every day, I write about beautiful things, today I’m also writing about one of my very special and favourite things The Family Locket. This has been in the family, on my Mother’s side for at least 152 years and is now entrusted to my care.
My Great Granny’s Locket
We know very little about my Great Grandmother apart from the fact that she was Spanish and we think the locket probably is too. The front of the locket is particularly beautiful, the silver being inlaid with a black stone, maybe jet.The back is covered in very delicate engraving. My Mum attributed the fact that her hair never went grey to her Spanish genes!
The front of the locket
Inside the locket are two tiny photographs, one of my Great Grandmother and the other of my Great Grandfather, the only photo we have of him.
Inside the locket
My Spanish Great Grandmother and her Husband
In the photograph, taken we assume sometime around 1860, she is wearing the locket and just look at his wonderful moustache! We treasure her studio portrait in its original card frame.
Studio portrait c 1860
2 I am told that my Granny, whom I knew well – she taught me to knit, to crochet and to play cards, but never on a Sunday! – wore the locket at her wedding on 27th April 1882 but I don’t have a photograph of that wedding. I do have a photograph of Granny and sometimes, when I pass a mirror, I fleetingly catch her image. I remember her as always smiling and I’m told I do that too!
My Granny
My Mum, married on 2nd September 1939, by her Father, The Very Reverend William Richards, the day before the Second World War was declared, wore the locket at her wedding but their honeymoon, planned to be in Paris, was a few snatched days in Blackpool instead. The photo isn’t very clear but the chain and shape can just be made out in this photo.
My Mum at her Wedding in front of Cockerham Vicarage, Lancashire
I, too, wore the locket at my wedding in Truro, Cornwall almost 30 years later in 1967.
I wore it at our Wedding August 1967
KJ, our second daughter, wore the locket at her wedding in London July 2006.
Our daughter, KJ wore it for her Wedding 2006
KJ also has Granny’s grin!
3 When my Brother and Sister-in-law were married in June 1993 in the Chapel at Truro School, the locket was V’s borrowed and old item. I know from the wedding in Senegal that not everyone knows the saying – ‘Something old, something new, Something borrowed, something blue’ to bring good luck to the newly wedded couple.
There is something very special about being able to lend such a precious item to someone you love. My Mum had died only three weeks before the wedding so this is a particularly poignant memory. She would have been so pleased that the locket was there again, at another family wedding and welcoming another daughter into the family.
My Brother, my Sister-in-law and my Dad
So, my three beautiful things today are all linked and all depend on the very precious and very beautiful Family Locket.