Wordless Wednesday

Letter dated; 9 February 1888 Birmingham, England

Edward Cashmore b 5Jun1802 d 29Jul1891
Maria Tomlinson b 10Jul1804 d 13Jul1894
m 15Sep1824

     At a time when life expectancy was around fifty this couple lived to be very old (89 and 90) even by our present day standards.   Edward Cashmore and Maria Tomlinson Cashmore are my third great grandparents.  This is a letter Edward (living in England) wrote in February 1888 to his daughter Sarah Ann Cashmore Kidgell, living in Logan, Utah.   I have the original letter as well as a letter Edward wrote in 1864.  How great is that!  I quote from the Kidgell-Cashmore Histories "How blessed we are that providence allowed Sarah Ann's treasured papers [letters] to remain safe for all those years--tucked away [in a trunk] in the family granary."  This letter is a 'testimony building' letter.
   This letter has no punctuation.

No.3 Back 132 Ickweld Square Monument Road, Birmingham

February 9th 1888

My Dear Girl we received your very kind and welcome letter

glad to hear of your improved health and good prosperity and we thank you most heartily for the help you sent us  and we thank Herman for his good feeling towards us  and we hope you both may enjoy the blessings of God through a long and prosperous life we cannot expect to see you anymore in this life as we know ours is drawing near the end we feel our infirmities very much and it often makes us wish for the change but we must wait with patience willingly God is good and knows what he has to do with us  till it pleases him to call us to eternal glory where we hope to meet everyone of you with all our old friends and acquaintances and where it will be a joyful meeting for all of us where we can be  with all our old friends and acquaintances and where all pain and sorrow is passed away and we are expecting it every week as everyday brings us nearer to it and I pray God bless us all everyday with everything he sees needful for us till that happy time for he is acquainted with all our wants and with all necessities and all the earth is his and the fulness thereof for he made it and he lends all the blessings of this life for a time to his children to prepare for that eternal happiness which he has in store for us through our Lord Jesus Christ and I thank God we are looking for that happy time everyday God helping us through Jesus Christ our Lord and may God bless you all yours is my prayer for evermore and we hope your children will prove a blessing o you if you should live to be old like us and want help when you cannot help yourselves give our love to Fred and girls and all inquiring  Friends we will be glad to hear from you as often as you can make it convenient and accept our Love to all from your ever affectionate parents 
E and M Cashmore


Oh My!  What a wonderful farewell letter!  What a testimony of how sweet death can be for family and friends when we meet on the other side.   What a testimony of knowing to be patient and endure to the end with all the infirmities Edward and Maria must have been experiencing;  to express their  gratefulness for children who are caring for them. I feel that Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Cashmore was a prayerful man, a man who studied and pondered his scriptures.  I feel Maria loved Edward dearly and Her testimony was one with Edward'
    Edward's dies three years after this letter was written.  Maria dies almost three years after Edward.
He dies at the age of eighty nine years one month and twenty four days in a Workhouse Infirmary. A Workhouse Infirmary is a terrible place!  This is very puzzling of why he was put into such a place.   He died of pneumonia and is buried at All Saints, Birmingham, Warwick, England.

Copies of Death Certificate's for
Edward and Maria Cashmore. 

     Following the death of Edward, Maria relocates to Bolton a city eighty miles away and is cared for by her son Daniel and his "new bride" Eliza Waine.   By my calculations she was ninety years and three days old when she died.   On her death certificate her age is recorded as ninety three. During this time in history a body was quickly buried in the area where death occurred so Maria Tomlinson Cashmore was conveniently buried in Bolton, Horwich, Lancastershire, England.

     At an earlier blog about Edward and Maria I thought they were not baptized into the LDS Church until they arrived in Salt Lake City in 1869.  Not so! sarah-anns-parents-arrive-from-england 1869 was a re-baptism which was very common to do at that time.  The entire family of Cashmore's joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in England at about 1852.  I also thought when Edward and Maria moved back to England it was because they were homesick for the adult children, Jane, Daniel and Edward William and grandchildren.   Again, not so!  They were concerned that these children were not being true to their LDS faith and losing their testimonies.   By moving back to England they hoped to be an influence on them and "re-new the spirit of truth in their hearts."  This information comes from a second great grand-daughter who lives in England and knows more of the story that has been handed down through the generations.   Thanks to Gail for getting my story straight.

     Next in the Cashmore/Kidgell line; the life of Fred Cashmore Kidgell.

Dad would be 98 today! And, my 'One Year Anniversary' of Blogging!

     Dad would be ninety eight years old today.  This is one of my favorite pictures of Dad at age sixty three, sitting at his desk at Lewis and Clark Elementary School Pocatello, Idaho. He retired from the Idaho Education System in June of 1976 (35 years ago) after forty three years of teaching/principal starting at the age of twenty.
I miss him; I miss his pleasant smile, his gentle mannerisms, his humor, his love I would feel just being in the same room with him.
     I inherited my dad’s beautiful dark skin and for this reason in 1996 I started doing ‘Family Search’.  Where does the dark complexion come from?  Dad didn't know!  Blogging about this will be sometime in the future but, I will say that two years ago I thought the answer would be found only to experience great disappointment.   I suspect Dad’s father’s line that goes back to 1831.  I was told a story that seemed very probable and a DNA test would prove the ‘story’ to be right or wrong.   It would be so simple if one of my brothers could take the test but, it had to be all males back to 1831.    Example; starting with Dad it goes like this, male, male, female, male.  The female which is Dad’s grandmother, Ellen Burns has two brothers.   I searched the 1930 census records and found a male descendant of one of Ellen’s  brother’s  and contacted him, (a second cousin once removed) living in Twin Falls, Idaho.  He agreed to take the DNA test which I paid for.   Something went wrong; the DNA that was sent to Gene Tree (the company I went through) by cousin Warren Burns was contaminated and Warren wouldn't redo the test or would no longer accept my phone calls! I got my money back from Gene Tree and I have put this matter on the ‘back burner’ to my great disappointment.

     Also, it was one year ago today I finally started this genealogy blog.  Of course the one who learns most from this blog is me.  One year and still I am not finished with KIDGELL/CASHMORE line,  because it forced me to do more research which takes time.   Having a 'cousin' who sent me the 'Histories of Kidgell and Cashmore's" has been a great help and I haven't begun to post all that is in these histories.  The next line will be the HEPWORTH ancestor's.  And they had eleven children who lived to be adults. So this blogging about my ancestors will go on for a long while.
   
     I would like to post at least once a week but, in the summertime that goal is very difficult.  I golf a couple times a week and we do travel.

    You might  be interested in reading one of my favorite blogs  by Nancy: http://nancysfamilyhistoryblog.blogspot.com/  I love the way she 'brings to mind' about her ancestors and her style of writing.

2 Aug 1913-13 Sept 1991