Well, new year, new resolve, so I have gone back to check on the earlier jobs I set myself and will start with Clara Guy.  I have upgraded my membership with Ancestry.com.au to include access to the London Metropolitan Archives and thus have been able to find a baptism record for Clara.  I still cannot find the civil registration of her birth and it may be that her parents did not register her at all.  I looked up several of her siblings, some of whom were registered/baptised and some not, so it was probably just a random thing.  In my own family, the younger members (including me) were not christened -apparently it was all organised, but, being wartime, the church was bombed, so plans changed and the family went home and ate the christening cake instead – and never got around to trying again.  It must have continued to worry my mother a bit as I remember she used to say “we ought to get you kids christened”  – but was easily dissuaded by this budding atheist.

Anyway, back to Clara – I still have to detail her parents, husband and children and read more about conditions in London in those years.  Now I have an address (see certificate on website) I can look it up on up the poverty map of London – more details of that later.