RE: MY EARLY YEARS:
PERSONAL MEMORIES OF KENT

I think your mother must be right about the photograph: it could not have been Edmund Thomas Curtis, the son of Thomas Curtis and Jane Manooch, because the only son of Edmund Thomas Curtis and Louisa Maria Cannings was my late father, Thomas William Curtis, of Kent, then Essex, then Hertfordshire, then Kent again, and he was born in Canterbury in 1907, too young to have been the WW1 soldier shown in our version of your picture. Besides, Edmund Thomas never looked like that. I remember that father was in touch with another branch of the family, and there is just a chance that it was with Winifred Eldridge nee Curtis.

Your suggestion that the photograph is of another Cannings sister is very plausible, and we have changed our note to the picture. I saw that yours was taken in Dover (with which we also had connections since my mother, Doris Maud, was born there).

Florence Mabel Curtis (an Assistant Matron at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital, and a spinster) was one of the four sisters of my father Thomas William Curtis (the others were Mary, Helen and Alice, now all departed). When she died, a box full of photographs, hair-curl cuttings of the 19th century Ewells, and a Ewell will of about 1820, were passed to me as an interested member of the family (we also have the bible pages which Alex has told you about, and some other family documents).

Family bibles suffered in the Canterbury floods of the early part of the 20th century, and sad to relate that many family curios were lost in a robbery when Florence was herself in a hospital in her later years. Many of the photographs remain un-identified, especially the young children of the 1910's, 1920's and 1930's. It is very satisfying to know that William 'Bill' Curtis married Edith, and to learn more about that branch of the family. We have mature photographs of some of Bill's brothers and sisters, but not of Bill himself, and I had born it in mind as something curious that none of Thomas Curtis/Jane Manooch's children served in WW1. Now you have disproved that.

B Thomas Curtis - March 21st 2006