Musings on these wedding photos:
These are ‘faces’ taken from the formal wedding group. These are the first four, arranged alphbetically according to name.
Alfred George Archer is the groom’s father, and fairly easily found in the group photo at row 3 from the front, slightly left of centre. He is Phil’s Great Grandfather, who died in 1913, whereas his wife Olive lived until the 1930s, which, sadly, was the decade in which the bride of this wedding in 1902, also died. Alfred George Archer was a government excise officer (ie Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs as it is currently known), and also a prominent Methodist local preacher, who had been involved in (if not led) a revival of Methodism in Rothwell, Northamptonshire in (about) the 1860s/70s. He was ‘Church of England’ (like his father, mother and siblings), I believe, before he went (with his job at HMRC) to Wells, Somerset, where his boss was Edward Reed (see below, also in this photograph), member of a very prominent Methodist family, whose daughter, Olive, he married. His job took him from Wells to Rothwell, then to Shillingford, Oxfordshire, and finally back to Oxford. Click here to move to Alfred George’s cv.
Alice and Annie Gilder are the younger sisters of the bride, and sitting at the RHS of her as you look at the photo(on her LHS). In 1902 they were living in Hinckley. The whole family had suddenly moved from Oxford to Hinckley in the middle-to-late 1880s in the wake of an upset affecting Walter Gilder, their father, following the death of his wife (name escapes me for the moment - to be entered in due course) in about 1883.
And I don’t really know who Annie Bennett is. Could she have any connection with the family of Oswald Bennett whom my father’s sister Olive Archer (the mother of my cousin Gill Fisher) married in (I think) 1942?
The names have been very kindly given to me by my cousin Gill Fisher, from whom also the main wedding group photo comes, and I am extremely grateful to Gill. One immediate thought about Alice Gilder is totally unconnected with the wedding. It’s this. When I used to go to Wesley Memorial Methodist Church (in New Inn Hall street, Oxford) with my dad, Frederick George Blake Archer, in the 1940s and 1950s (from about age 7 to age 16 ie 1948 to 1957), there was a lady who occasionally attended the church, called Mrs Barnett. This, I now know, was Alice Gilder, sister of Lizzie Gilder, the bride in the wedding photo. She had married a ‘Mr Barnett’, who didn’t comet to the church. However the point that occurs to me is this. Why didn’t my dad tell me that Mrs Barnett was my ‘Great Aunt Alice’, the sister of my, very sadly, long-deceased (in 1938) grandma Lizzie, whom I never met, as I was born in 1941. So, in a way, I thereby missed an opportunity to meet at least one member of the Gilder family, my dad’s mother’s family. In fact, I don’t think I did meet even one member of the Gilder family in my youth, nor until about the 1990s, when I made my own investigations and made contact with Walter and Jean Gilder (both of whom have now died) via the Unitarian chapel in Hinckley. Details about the Gilder family kindly provided by Walter and Jean and their family will be posted in due course. (pba.8.1.2015). Perhaps my dad was reticent about introductions, as indeed I am. Or perhaps there was some reason why, in the past (ie before the 1940s), the ‘Barnett’ branch of the family had lost contact with the Archer branch? I will post family trees of all these people as soon as I can.