Digging around in the family archives this afternoon selecting images for this Sunday’s episode of Held in Mind, which features more of my grandparents’ courting letters from 1946.

Came across this photo, near enough a hundred years old, of my paternal great-grandmother, Mary. I haven't written about her yet at all though I might.

She died at 29 from TB. My grandfather, Tom, was 9 and his younger sister, also Mary, was only 7. A couple of years later, their father, Alexander, went on to marry his dead wife's cousin (ALSO called Mary…)

Alexander’s young life had been hard, too. His own mother had gotten pregnant as an unmarried teenager and was abandoned by the father. She died when her son was a toddler and he was then brought up by a much older and – by all accounts – cruel stepfather and, eventually, his maternal grandmother.

Tom and Mary would also spend the two years between their mother's death and Alexander’s remarriage living in a different town with their maternal grandmother. Incidentally, this town was where my paternal grandparents were also growing up, though this was never mentioned to me. I saw the two sides of my family as being world's apart in the way, I’m sure, wee people often do.

All four of my grandparents lost a parent in childhood. Can you imagine? Two sides of a family’s story built on loss.