Gallery
Portraits and family photographs collected for the scrapbook, people first, then houses and graves, then documents. Click any photo to enlarge it.
People
Portraits and family photographs. Three are still unidentified — if you recognise anyone, please add a note.
Unidentified · c. 1870–1890. A studio portrait, probably a cabinet card or carte de visite. The sitter is a bearded man in his twenties, leaning on a carved pedestal with a lion-mask. The print is faded and foxed. It came in batch 3 with no name.
Unidentified · c. 1905–1915. A young man in a dark three-piece suit and striped tie, with a watch chain, a cross-shaped fob and a round medal. It came with Okill and Perkins material, so he could be George Edwin Okill (b. 1877) or one of his brothers, but that is only a guess. The medal might identify him if the original can be examined.
31 December 1945. Identified by the family as Clifford Simpson at a ceremony in Athens where American Silver and Bronze Star medals were presented to British servicemen. The man in the dark suit at the centre is probably the American official who presented them. Still to check: which man is Cliff, which medal he received, and his unit.
31 December 1945. A second print of the same ceremony, kept with Chapter 7. Clifford Simpson is in the back row.
Unidentified · 1960s. A young woman in a striped shirt-dress beside an early-1960s saloon car, with the original negative beside it. By age she could be Judith Simpson (b. 1942), Sancia Berkeley-Thomas (b. 1948) or someone from another branch.
Unidentified · 1960s. A young woman in a striped shirt-dress beside an early-1960s saloon car, with the original negative beside it. By age she could be Judith Simpson (b. 1942), Sancia Berkeley-Thomas (b. 1948) or someone from another branch.
Houses and graves
Family homes and the Wright graves at Felsted.
Photo c. 1940s–50s. A plain two-storey brick house on a village street. Probably the house of John Wright Cliff (1830–1917), born at Boreham.
Photo c. 1970s–80s. Headstones of the Wright family in the churchyard of Holy Cross, Felsted. The inscriptions can’t be read in the scan.
Felsted churchyard. A kerbed grave with a small arched headstone. The name seems to read “… William Wright”.
Felsted churchyard. The kerbstone reads roughly “In loving memory of Ann Wright, wife of Anthony Bentall Wright, who died 2? August 190?, aged 8? years … also Anthony Bentall Wright”. Neither is in the tree yet.
Felsted churchyard. The kerbstone reads roughly “In loving memory of Ann Wright, wife of Anthony Bentall Wright, who died 2? August 190?, aged 8? years … also Anthony Bentall Wright”. Neither is in the tree yet.
1958–1962. Cliff and Irene’s house in Lagos, where they lived until they left Nigeria in 1962.
1967–1980. Cliff and Irene’s London house: a late-Victorian terrace in red and yellow brick, with a shaped Dutch gable.
Documents
The records behind the research.
25 October 1792. Great Dunmow parish marriage register, entry 126. John Cliff of High Easter, bachelor, married Margaret Elles, spinster, by banns.
19 February 1908. George Henry Okill is paid one quarter’s superannuation of £6 5s 0d, so he had retired from the Kent County Constabulary by 1908.
Saved from Geni. A Geni profile for Anne Stafford, wife of Richard de Clifford of Bobbing Court.
History of Parliament. Third son of George Clifford of Bobbing Court and Ursula Finch; killed in Ulster in 1599.
Saved 2009. An Ancestry profile of a John Perkins of Withycombe — probably the source of the wrong Williton death in our tree.
Saved 2009. Another researcher’s tree for Thomas Joseph Okill, with different birth years for his parents.