Instant Cousins

Tag: Carver

  • Writing letters, part two

    My mother’s letters were always quite short. Notes mostly, about her week, who she had met or visited. In October 2000 she was very busy with the British Legion annual Poppy Appeal. She had been a member of the Women’s Branch of the British Legion since the 1950’s when my father had joined the Legion.…

  • Letter writing, part one

    Now, in 2025, the number of letters being written are very few. In Denmark a decision has been made to stop collecting and delivering letters because the cost is now so prohibitive and there has been a 90% drop in the us of letter delivery. Given the annual and sometimes sharp increases in postage in…

  • Sussex Roots

    This week I am returning to the Carver’s who originated in Lodsworth, Sussex. It is December with short days. I wonder what life was like in agriculture in those mid-19th Century days. Tending cattle and looking after the farm land would have been a brutal lifestyle in the rain and wind. While writing this I…

  • Tracing the Carvers

    I have been trying to discover the earlier generations of the Carver family, to whom I belong, in the early part of the 19th Century. My family originated in an agricultural area of Sussex, above the South Downs, between Horsham and Petersfield, in the registration district of Midhurst. There is a village near Easebourne called…

  • No Carver without a Spillett

    My title relates to the topic this week. Without the Spillett family there would have been no branch of the Carver family that I belong to. The union of these two families created a considerable dynasty of the Oxted Carver’s that stretches through five generations from my parent’s branch across the past 100 years. When…

  • A Victory Line-up

    These four men fought or served during the First World War. They served in Biggin Hill, the North Sea, India and France. They all survived the War, which, given the outbreak of the so-called Spanish Flu that ended the lives of as many men and women as the War, was a miracle. They all lived…

  • Bill Carver

    George William Eustace Henry Carver was my father. He always signed his name G.H. Carver, but everyone called him Bill. Unless my mother was admonishing him for something and then she called him William. Baptism entry in the Oxted Parish Church register for W.G.E.H Carver, Bill Carver, living in School Lane, his father was a…

  • Lodsworth, gateway to the Carver family

    The history of the Carver family has its roots in the agricultural 19th Century county of West Sussex. The small village of Lodsworth lies between Petworth and Midhurst, just above the South Downs. The views from Google street view suggest that the village was an idyllic place to have lived in, although I suspect that…