Isabel and Mary BROWN (aka STARKEY) and their descendants
Victoria and Henry Brown's first daughter, Isabel Ann Brown (aka Starkey), was born on 22 December 1884 in Tranmere, Cheshire, and she was christened at Tranmere on 26 April 1885. In the 1891 census she was with her grandmother, Isabel (née Owen), and bore the surname Starkey. In 1901 she was back with her mother and with the rest of the Starkey family. She married John Wilfred Minshall in St Nicholas Church, Liverpool on Christmas Day 1904. He had been born in 1885 [Birkenhead 1885, 2nd qt]. By 1911, according to the census, they were living at 83 Woodville Road (the Starkeys lived in an adjacent road), Birkenhead, with their daughters (Elizabeth) Victoria, born on 28 September 1905 and Ruth, born on 8 February 1909. In about 1914, Isabel gave birth to a son, Harold W Minshall, [Birkenhead 1914, 1st qt] who lived only a short time [d Liverpool 1914, 1st qt].
The family was still living in Woodville Road in 1919 when John was discharged from the army. He had enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery, 159th Bde, in 1915, aged thirty, 5ft 6 1/4 ins tall, a butcher who according to his army record may have had a tattoo of clasped hands. He spent some time in Brighton before embarking for France as a driver in February 1916. By the end of the war he had attained the rank of sergeant, had been awarded the Military Medal for bravery in the field and had been shot in the neck. Records on file show that there were two young ladies concerned about John's whereabouts. In March 1916 a Miss B Warman of Myrtle Street, Woolwich, where he had been stationed briefly before France, wrote to the War Office asking to know where he was. A Miss Alice Hayward of Gladstone Place, Lewes Road, Brighton wrote three times, first in 1917, asking for contact details for John with whom she had been unable to correspond since he left for France. She must have obtained an address; when she wrote again in 1918 she stated that she had been writing every week but he had apparently not received her letters - "I have something very urgent to ask him and it is a great worry to me not to [be] able to hear".
In 1939 John, Isabella, and three of their four surviving children (another son had been born in 1917) were living at 186 Bebington Road, Birkenhead. John was a 'Beef Porter'.
John Wilfred Minshall (senior) died, aged 67, [Birkenhead 1952, 2nd qt] and Isabel Minshall died, aged 84, on 3 March 1968 [Rugby] >>>>>>>