"The family."

     "The family.  We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.  ~Erma Bombeck


Erik,
     I know a little about Poppa's mother's family, Charles and Anna Langford.  They would be my great-grandfather and great-grandmother.  Dad wrote down his memories of them.
                                                                  --Mom



     Charles Langford was a stonemason who worked on many churches around Nottingham-
shire. According to Poppa, he was a tyrant at home.  He was tall with the typical handlebar 'tash' (mustache) of the day.

typical work of a stonemason

a stonemason working on an arch--note the
bow tie?

     He enlisted or was drafted into the army in World War 1 at the age of 37.  He survived the war, returning home in 1919, caught the Spanish flu, and died in 1920 at the age of 42.  At his death he left his wife, Anna Maria Langford and 10 children, 7 girls and 3 boys--Ada, Ellen (Nell), Emily (my grandmother), Arthur, Richard, Connie, Mabel, Charles, Florrie, and Hilda.

Bit of history:  "The 1918 flu (the "Spanish flu") was an influenza pandemic. It was an unusually severe and deadly pandemic that spread across the world.  Most victims were healthy young adults.
The pandemic lasted from January 1918 to December 1920.  Between 50 and 130 million died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.  Even using the lower estimate of 50 million people, 3% of the world's population (which was 1.86 billion at the time) died of the disease. Some 500 million, or 27%, were infected."

'World War I did not cause the flu, but the close troop quarters and massive troop movements hastened the pandemic and probably both increased transmission and augmented mutation; it may also have increased the lethality of the virus. Some speculate the soldiers' immune systems were weakened by malnourishment, as well as the stresses of combat and chemical attacks, increasing their susceptibility."

'The fetid, rat-rich, body-rotting trenches provided ideal breeding grounds for the virus that would be responsible for more than five times as many deaths as the war itself.'

On Armistice Day, 1918, Britain is in the grip of the Spanish flu.

   


     Charles's wife, Anna Maria Langford, was, according to Poppa who knew her, a 'strong willed woman who would drink a jug of ale every day of her life.'  (Probably because she had 10 children!)  The children all lived to adulthood.
     She was a very good looking woman with auburn hair and dark eyes.  She had breast cancer at 56, had her breasts removed, and lived on until age 72.  One of her 10 children preceded her in death.  Florrie died in 1942 at age 42 of breast cancer.