Ancestors surprise us sometimes, don’t they? Just when you put them in a box labelled such and such a place or occupation, they go and do something wildly different that makes you smile.
Over to my 2x great-aunt Ann Ellen then – born in 1857, elder sister of my great-grandfather Mark John Leah, and last seen on the censuses at where else but Ashton Old Road, Openshaw.
In 1881 Ann Ellen is living with her husband Hugh Ashton, a 26-year-old iron turner, at 757 Ashton Old Road. The couple married only four years earlier, and already have three children – Bertha, three, Herbert two, and Hugh, nine months – and a servant to help with them, Eliza Ann Orrell, just 12.
A close-up of the charabanc - ‘Victoria Hotel, circular rides 1/-’ it says on the side. I can’t help wondering whether Ann Ellen or any of the other Ashtons might have hopped on board for the photo…