Lizzie’s Story 3: England

Lizzie, William, and Maggie Millar c. 1886 (Kings Lynn, Norfolk, England)

The Millar family moved to England around 1890, first to Wellington, Shropshire where William was a commercial traveller selling cloth, then settling in Kings Lynn, Norfolk where he was a clothier. In the 1891 and the 1901 Census Elizabeth is not shown as working but is listed as “wife”.

The censuses in England (and Scotland) were done in the spring, usually in April.

In 1901 the family was living at 19 Priory Lane in Kings Lynn, which is an old market town near the south east coast of England. William was enrolled in the school attached to the Episcopal church of All Saints South. Maggie was 18 and working as a confectioner in a bakery. Lizzie was 15 and a corset maker.

Dad never knew this about his mother. He knew that she liked fine clothes but he knew absolutely nothing about his maternal grandparents or about his family’s long tradition of work in the textile industry in both sides of his family.

A tragic end…

The 1901 Census was taken on March 31. One week later on April 7 Andrew died of complications from diabetes. When the census takers came to the door he may have been laying in bed, tended to by Elizabeth and the girls. He died a terrible and protracted death from “generalized gangrene.”

Exactly one year later Elizabeth followed him, dying at age 38 from TB. It’s likely that she picked it up in her years in the mills in Dundee. The family may have moved to England for a better life, but now tragedy had overcome them. The three children were alone, far from their Scottish relatives.

Andrew’s mother Margaret Ritchie had died years previously of breast cancer. His father Robert Dalgleish Millar, remarried and relocated to Glasgow, had just died in December of 1900. His sister Maggie Ritchie Millar 1865 was in Newburgh, Fife with her family.

Elizabeth’s aunts were still in Perthshire and her uncle William Clark, the lawyer, was in Edinburgh. I don’t know what happened immediately after the death of their parents but the children stayed close to each other over the years. Maggie and Lizzie must have taken care of William until he left school and went into the drapery business. Maggie eventually married an English man and settled in Lincolnshire; William became a cloth salesman and moved to India.

Lizzie loved Scotland. Over the next few years she went back and forth, always in touch with her sister and best friend Maggie.