Family photos

In the early 1900s my grandparents took a house for a short time in Southend-on-Sea. Next door lived a musical family with four children with whom my aunts and uncles played regularly. Indeed, for as long as I can remember my aunt had talked fondly of those days and wondered what had become of them all after they moved away. In 1979 a school friend who lived close by in my home town of Seaford introduced me to her cousin, the man who later that year was to become my husband. One day shortly after my aunt had died my husband and I were talking about our relatives and to my great surprise I was hearing names like Lalla, Kitty, Mamie and Hilda which were the names of the neighbours who lived next door in Southend. It turned out that it was indeed my husband's family who had lived next door eighty years ago and that both our mothers had been delivered by the same doctor. In my family albums we have photos of my husband's aunts pushing my mother in her pram and both families playing together in the garden all those years ago in Southend. I had often asked my mother who the children were in our albums never for one moment thinking they would one day be my in-laws. How sad that my aunt had died only a matter of days before finding out what had become of them all.