Twiglets

I’ve a funny feeling that Mary, the last in line of my great-grandfather Mark John Leah’s nine siblings, may run rings around me. She’s at that difficult age. Recorded as six years old on the 1881 Census, she’ll be 16 by the time the next one comes around and the world’s her oyster – literally, if she ends up emigrating across the pond or down under like her closest-in-age brothers Harry and Ernest.

To be honest, I’m surprised I’ve not bumped into her already. She’d have been just 11 or 12 when her parents Martin and Mary died, so I half expected one of her siblings might have taken her in, and there