2012 - Hubbard and Phelps fourth cousins meet up.
Nick and I had been in touch through email to Penelope Forrest (née Phelps) on
and off for several years. Penelope lives in South Africa. She and her brother
James are descended from Elizabeth and Joseph Phelps through Harriet, fifth
daughter /fifth child and Arthur Phelps the tenth child/fourth son.
We are all 4x great grandchildren of Thomas and Frances Dickinson.
In 2012 Penelope decided to make a whistle-stop tour of England and Madeira to
meet various family contacts she had made whilst putting together her book –
A Memoir in Letters.
Penelope and her brother James came
to England in May of 2012. Nicolas came to join us for part of the time. We had
great fun catching up with family history stories and getting to know each other
better.
Before coming to me, Penelope
had been given a whole wodge of family letters mainly to Arthur and Joseph
Phelps dating around 1840s/1850’s. I was able to help get some of them very
carefully ironed out/ cleaned up as they had been sitting in a stable somewhere,
complete with straw and dirt. We had great fun looking at them and they
reaffirmed how close the families were at that time.
These eye opening letters had
seemed to travel the world as they were passed from one person to another,
certainly from Madeira to England; with people waiting for ships to sail – all
this being before regular postal services with stamps etc.
Penelope had just published her
book
A Memoir in Letters,
based on the family letters
kept by her mother from former generations, so it seemed as though a second book
was suddenly presenting itself!