I was reminded when logging on to do some transcription work for a family history society that it’s 140 years ago today since my paternal grandfather Frank Milton Dobson was born. As I really need to crack on and finish the job I originally set out to do, this will necessarily be fairly brief, but I couldn’t let it pass without popping up a brief recognition of the date. We were never big on those sorts of anniversaries in our immediate family, but I’ve become much more aware of them since starting, albeit in a bit of a disorganised and desultory fashion, on the family history!

I’d always assumed we were Yorkshire Tykes through and through, so imagine my surprise to find Frank was born not in God’s Own Country, but, shock, horror, on t’other side of the Pennines, in Manchester! His father Frank Edmund was a Master basketmaker or skep maker; his mother Jane, I was equally surprised to find, originally hailed from only about 10 miles away from where I now live, in Worcestershire. Frank M. was the 6th of 8 children and he was christened in Manchester cathedral, not far from Bagshaw’s Court where the family home was.

Even my father and aunt barely knew Frank as sadly, he died when they were only 5 and 3 respectively. This probably explains why I don’t recall any conversations about Frank when I was young. It was only after dad’s death that I discovered there was an entire step-family, with whom there’d been no contact, from Frank’s first marriage to Ellen Louisa, but that alone merits another tale, thanks mainly to members of that side of the family who got in touch some years ago…

Frank and my grandmother married in 1926, some time after he had been pensioned off from the army for ill health, and he is listed on the marriage certificate as a Tailor’s presser. As Gran was a seamstress (as were a couple of her sisters) it might perhaps suggest how they originally crossed paths. They had only a few years together, and from a cousin of my dad’s I gather that for some of that time he was away. He died, aged only 47, of double pneumonia and phthisis (TB) in hospital in Halifax in 1932.

I still have a bit of work to do on filling in some of the gaps in his documented history and will, I hope, record some more of what I have discovered, but for now suffice it to say of the granddad I never knew that it’s been interesting getting to know more about him from the jigsaw of bits that are available. From the very few photos I have, he certainly passed on a strong family resemblance to some relatives; not sure I’m too happy that I seem to have got the ears, though!