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).