Fanny Amelia Sedge.

Fanny Amelia Sedge in middle.

Fanny Amelia Sedge was born in Gillingham in Kent in 1870 to James Miller who was born himself in the town in 1837 and a Caroline Miller who was born in Lambeth, London in 1846. Fanny had one brother Henry James who was four years older than her, disabled and born in Lambeth, birthplace of their mother.
Fanny was my great, grandmother.As my parents were cousins she was my mum`s mothers mum and also my dad`s.Fanny`s father James was a master on the Thames Sailing barges which ferried goods up and down the Thames and along the east coast in the eighteen and nineteen hundred`s.Fanny spent most of her childhood living on a Thames sailing barge with her father and the rest of her family.
I have information that they spent some time on the All Hallows barge which was destroyed by a straw fire off Harwich on a trip to London on the 27th, May 1889.They also spent sometime on the Stoke barge which was built by William H Lake at Northfleet, Kent in 1859 and completed in the famous Medway race in 1874.
Fanny went onto to marry a grave digger called Charles George Sedge in Bobbing in Kent in 1886. Charles was in fact known as Sage then until the family moved to Barking in Essex when the family name suddenly became Sedge. I think this was probably down to the fact that they  had a Kent accent and people probably wrote the name has it sounded.
For some reason that I have not been able to find out the family came to live in Barking during the early nineteen hundred`s and quickly settled at Creekmouth in the town which was a collection of cottages built by Lawes Chemicals which Charles Sedge worked at until he died.
Charles and Fanny had seventeen children in total together fourteen of whom survived to adulthood.Fanny outlived Charles by about thirty years and died at the age of ninety in 1953. The photograph of the little old lady in the photograph is of her not long before she died.I never meet her as she died before I was born but from what I have heard she was a fantastic character and someone who my mum adored.She must have been really strong despite her small statute as she lived through two world wars, much poverty, had seventeen children and still lived till ninety. Sadly they do not make women like that anymore..