Treasure Trove #10: Auntie Ciss's Fob Watch

Horrible rain today. I went into town earlier, and will have to return to correct the mistakes made on my grocery bill, but took no pictures while out.

I am currently curating this watch which belonged to our Auntie Ciss. It was discovered by the Spotlight Kid when we were last in Sutton Coldfield on family business. The box in which it was found has written on it in my mother's hand 'Auntie Ciss fob watch'. The wooden pedestal on which it sits is angled at the top, which is why the front of the watch dial is sharper at the bottom than the top.

My Auntie Ciss lived in Sutton Coldfield as a spinster with my father's parents, and was my grandmother's sister. I remember her as a benign but timid presence in the home but whose conversation never went beyond vague pleasantries. I may be doing her a terrible injustice but I assumed at the time that she lived there as she was incapable of surviving independently.

Her real name was Caroline Hall, and she and my grandmother were born in Stafford, Caroline on 17 December 1872. My grandmother, Amy, was a milliner in Stafford - skilled work which must have been relatively well paid, and judging by the quality of this watch Ciss may have been equally skilled in her line of work when she was younger. Perhaps she was a milliner, also? She died on 9 January 1962, before I was a teenager and one of the earliest family deaths I remember.

It is rather sad how little we know of the lives of our forbears, whose memory lives on in these small treasures.

Alternative:
Reverse

TG-1 settings: Program mode, Super Macro, flash (off)

L.
14.12.2012

Blip #874
Consecutive Blip #087
Day #995

Family Business series
Treasure Trove series

Lozarhythm Of The Day:
Martha Wainwright - Proserpina (2012)
This unbearably touching song, so tenderly performed here, was the last work to be written by Martha Wainwright's mother Kate McGarrigle, and was performed while terminally ill at the last concert she performed.

One year ago: Smokey, 2354 hr