Family – and Other – Ties
I know it’s hard for many people to put a positive spin on the pandemic and resulting lockdowns this year.
I also know I have been lucky. My health has been good and the largely solo world of a freelance journalist and researcher meant that not going out or seeing people wasn’t much of a change for me! On the plus side the slower pace of life allowed me to give a bit more time to ongoing research for a family memoir.
No doubt about it, I come from a colourful ancestry – in the UK in the early 1600s, when my 11-times great grandfather John Quarles’ enclosure of his land at at Cotesbach, Leicestershire became one of the touchpapers for the Midland Revolt (see here for a talk I did at Cotesbach recently on climate change), and in the early 20th century in America where, for a time, my great grandfather and his family were rarely out of the headlines.
In my researches over the summer, I came across an article about my great grandmother in the newsletter of the Morongo Basin Historical Society, based in California’s Yucca Valley. Although I was born in California there’s no family connection to that area. Instead, the building where the Historical Society is housed (once a landmark rural post office) was donated by the daughter of a policeman who once arrested my great grandmother in Hollywood. Talk about six-degrees of separation!
The photo on this page is of my great-grandmother, Mattie Quarles, and her third husband and partner in crime.
I’m a big fan of local newsletters, and social record keepers in general, and was pleased to offer an update to the newsletter’s readers, in the Winter 2020 edition, on what happened next in my great grandmother’s life.
I look forward one of these days, when we can all travel again, to visiting Jim and Claudia Spotts who so kindly allowed me to make a contribution to their publication.
