For some time now I've been looking into family history on Ancestry.com. I knew my father, Joseph Stanislaus (originally Fairbrother, then Philipson) was the illegitimate son (b 1907) of a Catholic nun, Annie Louise Fairbrother, and a Jewish dentist, Joseph Cohen, and it seems I've tracked him - my grandfather - down. My grandmother later married Matthias Philipson (Philipson is my maiden name) and had more children. I don't suppose the 'incident' was ever spoken about. Whether Joseph ever knew he had a son I don't know. He later married twice, but had no more children. Now I am in contact with the descendants of his sister.
How a nun and a Jew ever got together is something that intrigues me. My goodness, what a scandal it would have been! Not only a nun pregnant, but to a Jew!!! Those were the days, remember, when even the protestants and catholics didn't speak to each other.
In 1905 my maternal grandfather, Joseph William George Allen, fathered a daughter out of wedlock and took the baby home from the hospital and reared her himself. Apparently the mother was not allowed by her parents to marry him. He employed a housekeeper to live in and help with the child and, as a single woman living with a man was frowned upon, he married her. Twelve years later, she, Florence May Allen, became my grandmother.
Not half an hour ago, when going through the thousands of photos and documents I've dragged out in past days, I made another discovery: Florence May was herself illegitimate. She was one year old when her parents married. Well, who knows if the man her mother married was her father...
How a nun and a Jew ever got together is something that intrigues me. My goodness, what a scandal it would have been! Not only a nun pregnant, but to a Jew!!! Those were the days, remember, when even the protestants and catholics didn't speak to each other.
In 1905 my maternal grandfather, Joseph William George Allen, fathered a daughter out of wedlock and took the baby home from the hospital and reared her himself. Apparently the mother was not allowed by her parents to marry him. He employed a housekeeper to live in and help with the child and, as a single woman living with a man was frowned upon, he married her. Twelve years later, she, Florence May Allen, became my grandmother.
Not half an hour ago, when going through the thousands of photos and documents I've dragged out in past days, I made another discovery: Florence May was herself illegitimate. She was one year old when her parents married. Well, who knows if the man her mother married was her father...
2 comments:
This is so fascinating. My mum is envious as we can't track any of our family history. Keep digging, mum wants to know what you find.
This is the stuff novels are made off I began the quest of digging into my family but dosed off with boredom after a couple of weeks.
They all seemed to work hard and end up being poor ! How surprising.
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