In amongst all the photographs of my Scottish relatives there are several ones taken of children who no-one in my family can now identify. Mostly they are just assumed to be ones of long-forgotten family friends or long-dead distant cousins, and often there is nothing remarkable about them. They are taken in anodyne studios with the young sitters in their Sunday best clothes, their hair brushed and faces scrubbed. The only thing that gives anything away about the time and place is the manner of their dress and hairstyles or the name of the studio. I have filed these images away in a separate folder, knowing that their identity will probably always remain anonymous.

Girl in a Graveyard

There is one such snapshot that I have become particularly fascinated with as it depicts a small girl on her own in a possible post-war outfit standing in what looks like a Victorian-era cemetery with relatively fresh graves. Because of the location it should be easy to identify her, and I would have possibly asked older relatives about her as a child myself, curious to now what she was doing in such a place. The name ‘Susan’ keeps popping into my head, yet I cannot remember seeing the image when I was young. My mother also has no recollection of the photograph, even though the memory of it might have been expected to stay with us over the years as it is the only one in the whole collection to feature someone in a graveyard, let alone a child. 

What I particularly like about digitalising old photographs is the ability – noire detective-style again- to zoom in on details and magnify these. It’s through doing this that I discovered the broken and dirty nails of my great great-grandmother, Christina Whitehead, indicating a life of hard work; and the locket round the neck of her daughter-in-law (my great-grandmother), depicting her oldest son who was fighting in the Great War. When I start to enlarge this image of ‘Susan’ in the cemetery I notice that the small rounded gravestones in the background are not actually what they seem. They are not made of stone but glass, and the circular shapes represent what was once termed rather macabrely ‘immortelles‘. This was a glass or ceramic dome, often with a removable metal frame, used to protect artificial flowers and trinkets. And while they were most popular during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, in some graveyards they were still in use until later in the last century. As they appear to be more prevalent in certain places, such as Wales, this could be an identifying feature of the photograph.

An Immortelle (c) Market Lavington Museum – link to website  here

And as to the reason the girl is there in the cemetery? Well, it’s tempting to think she was with her family visiting the grave of a relative – perhaps even a parent or sibling – and to assume this is what has given her a distracted and quizzical air. And yet there is not a specific gravestone in this image and it is difficult to read too much into her countenance. I’m wary of describing her as looking sad or upset, and at that age the graveyard trip might not have meant that very much to her. Even if there had been a recent death in the family, children react differently to grief and cannot always make the same connections that we do. 

So while I might never know the identity of this little girl – who is very possibly still alive – or what she was doing in the cemetery, the photograph has created a space which my own questions and stories have begun to fill. And maybe one day I will find out more.

The Incidental Genealogist, April 2024 

P.S. Due to current writing and study commitments, I will be posting every quarter instead of monthly from now on.