James Reynolds
Born Great Sampford, Essex, 1847 .

Sarah Reynolds
Born Great Sampford, Essex, 1850.

Louisa Reynolds
Born Great Sampford, Essex, 1852 .

John Reynolds
Born Ickleton 1866. John moved to London, and in 1891 he was living in the same block of flats as his brother Alfred, Compton Buildings, built as a model industrial dwelling by philanthropist employers. He was employed as a brewery worker, and he married Lily Andrews of Whittlesford at St Paul's church Clerkenwell on 2 February 1895. His sister Eliza was one of the witnesses, and they were all able to sign their names. The register entry survives, and shows that Lily was also living in Compton Buildings. Their son Frank was baptised at St Paul's on 15th January 1901, and the family was still at Compton Buildings, but they had moved to Edmonton in north London by 1911. John died in 1939 at the age of 73, and was buried at Dry Drayton. His address in the registers was given as Tottenham General Hospital, London.

Emily Reynolds
Born Ickleton 1868. In 1891, Emily was a servant in the household of Henry Montagu Butler, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. She was a witness at her sister Eliza's marriage on Christmas Eve 1896, but does not appear on the 1901 census. She was probably the Emily Reynolds who died in the last quarter of 1897 in south-west Cambridgeshire, possibly at Melbourn. She was 29 years old.

Ann Reynolds
Born Ickleton 15th April 1870. She appears with the family on the 1881 census as Annie, the name she is recorded under thereafter. In 1891, Annie was a kitchenmaid in the household of the gentleman William Paley at Brook House, Horringer, Suffolk. She married George Elsey on 4th August 1895 at St Stephen's church, Tredegar Street, Bow in east London. George had been born in Barton, Cambridgeshire in 1869. However, his father died before the 1871 census, and he and his widowed mother Sarah Elsey are shown living with her parents William and Naomi Morgan in Barton. By 1881, Sarah had remarried, to William Bye, and George was shown as George Bye, a 12 year old agricultural labourer living with his parents and siblings at Whittlesford in Cambridgeshire. In 1891 he was 22 and still with them in Duxford, Ann's parents' home parish, but had reverted to his own surname, Elsey. At the time of Ann and George's marriage, George gave his address as 24 Morville Street, Bow, and his profession as a carman. Annie's residence at the time of the marriage was Sevenoaks in Kent - presumably, she was in service there. Her father Robert's profession was given as stockman. The two witnesses to the marriage were George's brother and sister, William James Bye and Florence Annie Bye. Florence may well have been a friend of Annie's.

Ann and George had two children, Edwin George Robert, born at 49 Melville Street on 28th August 1896, and baptised on October 11th at St Stephen's church, and Ernest Joseph, born at 49 Melville Street on the 1st November 1897 and baptised on 12th June 1898 at St Stephen's church. But by the time of the 1901 census, Annie was dead. She died at 49 Melville Street on 29th November 1898. She was just 28 years old. In 1901 George was shown as a widower, living at 49 Morville Street North Bow in London. His profession was a railway plate layer. The older child Edwin was living with him, while the younger child Ernest was living with his grandparents Robert and Mary Ann Reynolds in Dry Drayton. Ernest joined the Navy during the First World War, and lived to the age of 89, dying in 1986.

Eliza Jane Reynolds
Born Great Chesterford 1872. In 1891 she was living with and looking after her 73 year old great aunt Sarah Reynolds at Radwinter in Essex. Eliza married the widower Charles Thompson at Dry Drayton on Christmas Eve 1896. They lived in Dry Drayton. She had five children, Charles, Sidney, Albert, Christopher and Cornelia. Her husband's nephew Walter was killed in WWI in 1918 and is on the Dry Drayton war memorial. She died at the age of 68, and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 21st August 1940.

Edmund Reynolds
Born Great Chesterford 1874. At the age of 16 he was shown as a shepherd boy on the 1891 census. Soon after, Edmund moved to London. He married Minnie Bard, who coincidentally was also born in Great Chesterford, at West Ham in the fourth quarter of 1898. Their son Frederick was born in Stratford, east London in 1900. In 1901 they were living in West Ham, and Edmund was working as a horse tram driver. A second son, Edmund, was born in 1908. By 1911, Edmund senior was working as a horse driver for an egg and butter merchant, and the family were living in the Portman Buildings complex at Lisson Grove in west London. Edmund died in London in 1923 at the relatively young age of 49.

Ellen Louisa Reynolds
Born Duxford 1876. In 1901, Ellen was a servant in the household of Edmund Powers at 70a Ladbroke Grove, Kensington in London. One of the other servants in the household, Cornelia Wiles, was a witness to Ellen's marriage to Harry Bailey at Dry Drayton on 25th April 1910. Harry Bailey was a groom, from Hadleigh in Suffolk. They lived in Dry Drayton. Ellen died in Cambridge in 1966 at the age of 89.

Frederick Thomas Reynolds
Born Duxford 1878. My great-grandfather - see below.

Robert George Reynolds
Born Duxford 1881. Robert was an agricultural labourer in Dry Drayton at the time of the 1901 census, but by 1903 he had moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire and married Clara Julia Smart, a local girl. In 1901, Clara had been a servant in the household of the Civil Servant Charles Martin in St Albans, but what the census return does not show is that she also had a child. His name was George William, and he was being fostered by another family in the town. After her marriage to Robert, they had at least six more children of their own: Robert, Albert, James, Mabel, Edith and Kitty. In 1911, the family were living in St Albans and Robert was working as a horse shunter in a trolley works. On June 6th 1915, Robert signed up as a Private soldier with the Remount Squadron of the Army Service Corps. He was 33 years and 7 months old and stood 5 feet 4 and a half inches tall. Interestingly, he gave the date of his marriage to Clara as 1900 rather than 1903, presumably to make it look as if George had not been born out of wedlock, although he did not include George in the list of his children. Perhaps he and Clara had become accustomed to giving 1900 as the date of their marriage, although on the 1911 census form they recorded truthfully that they had only been married for seven years.

Robert appears to have served at the ASC depot in Romsey in Hampshire throughout the War. The only incident of note occured when he was confined to barracks for 4 days in 1916 for being absent without leave on parade. He survived the War to be awarded a pension in 1919. Clara died in 1945. I have not yet found the date of Robert's death.

At the age of 22, his son Tom was working as an agricultural labourer in Dry Drayton for the 1901 census, but on the 28th November 1903 Tom married my great-grandmother Alice Anable, whose family lived a few doors from the Reynolds in Dry Drayton High Street. Alice had been working in service in Cambridge, but when they married at St Peter and St Pauls' church, Dry Drayton, Alice was heavily pregnant. Their first child was born just two months later, and they called her Winifred Ellen Reynolds. She was my grandmother. Alice and Thomas moved into a cottage in the village, and two more children were born there, Cecilia Emily and Ernest Walter.

In 1908, Tom got a job as a horsekeeper at Valley Farm, West Wratting, and the family moved on. Valley Farm was a huge concern dedicated to raising horses for the Newmarket bloodstock trade. It still exists today, and sits in the western edge of West Wratting parish beside what is now the A11, not far from the Cambridge suburb of Fulbourn. Another child, Abigail Annie, was born there. In 1914, Tom and Alice were in Hildersham for the birth of their fifth child, Lydia Frances, but when the First World War broke out Tom enlisted as a Private soldier in the 1st Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. His brother-in-law, Alice's brother Percy, joined up with him. The 1st Suffolks were part of the 28th Division of the Army which was formed at Winchester during December 1914, suggesting that Thomas joined up a few months after the start of the War, but before conscription was introduced. The Division began landing at Le Havre on 16th January 1915, and the 1st Suffolks arrived in March, although Thomas Reynolds's medal record shows that he arrived in France on the 8th of June. The delay may have been because Thomas's daughter Lydia died in the spring of 1915 when she was just one year old, and he may have been given compassionate leave. About this time, the family moved to 4 Shelley Row in the Castle Hill area of Cambridge, where Tom would spend the rest of his life.

Tom's battalion took part in the Second Battle of Ypres (but this was before he disembarked) and the Battle of Loos (where Thomas probably fought, and where the British first used poison gas on a large scale). But on 19th October 1915 the 1st Suffolks were ordered to prepare to sail to more distant shores. The first units left Marseilles for Alexandria in Egypt five days later, and all units were there by 22 November. They were then ordered on to Salonika in Greece, and completed disembarkation on 4 January 1916. The 1st Suffolks spent almost the next three years encamped at Salonika, a much safer place than the Western Front in France, with just one brief, furious battle at the end of the War. In 1916, the Reynolds's youngest daughter was named Salonica Ruth Reynolds in memory of where her father had been when she was born.

These are the six children of Tom and Alice Reynolds. Unlike their parents' generation, they all stayed close to Cambridge.

Tom's wife Alice's younger brother Harry was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, but Tom survived the conflict unscathed. At the end of the War, he returned to his family in Shelley Row, and he took a job with the Star Brewery on Newmarket Road as a drayman, delivering Tollemache Ales to pubs in Cambridge and the surrounding villages. Thomas's parents Robert and Mary Ann Reynolds both spent the rest of their lives in Dry Drayton. Robert died in 1916 at the age of 75. Mary Ann, who had been born when Queen Victoria had been on the throne for just four years, lived until the grand old age of 98, dying in 1939, a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, and into the lifetime of her great-granddaughter, my mother. Robert and Mary Ann were both buried in Dry Drayton churchyard.

Their son Tom and his wife Alice's eldest daughter, my grandmother Win, worked as a domestic servant. She is pictured at the age of 15 on the group photograph of those serving the huge Peace Celebration feast on Parkers Piece, Cambridge on 9th July 1919. She was then briefly in service, but on 10th July 1923 she married Edmund Stanley Cornwell, who came from Oakington, the neighbouring village to her home village of Dry Drayton. However, Win and Stan married more than a hundred miles away from Cambridgeshire in Lichfield, Staffordshire. They were both just 19 years old. They gave false ages to acquire the certificate, as one of them had to be of age, that is to say 21 or over. They were in Staffordshire because my grandmother was pregnant, and they had run away to get married. Stan's older sister Ruth lived at Colton on the outskirts of Rugeley, and she arranged the marriage for them.

Their first child was born less than three months later. He had a learning disability, and lived with his mother for the rest of her life. Winifred's parents never really forgave her for her pregnancy and hasty marriage to someone of whom they did not approve. It was only long after her death that the family discovered that Winifred's mother Alice had also been six months pregnant when she married Winifred's father in 1903. Winifred was that child.

Stan and Win returned to Cambridge after the birth of their first child, and lived in Shelley Row near to Win's parents. However, they seem not to have got on well with them, and after the birth of two more children they did a moonlight flit, first to Barway near Ely and then to Grunty Fen on the other side of the river, before settling in Little Thetford. They had nine children altogether, of which my mother was the second youngest.

Win's father Tom died at the relatively young age of 64 in 1944, and was buried at Dry Drayton. Her mother Alice went to live with Win's sister Lon in Kings Hedges Road, Cambridge.

Although my grandfather died before I was born, Winifred Cornwell was the grandparent I knew best. I spent the first three years of my life living in the same house as her at Green Hill, Little Thetford in the Isle of Ely. After we moved to Cambridge she would often visit us, and I would go and stay with her. I spent a lot of the spring of 1966 living with her because of complications with the birth of my youngest brother, and there I met her mother, my great-great-grandmother Alice Anable, in the last few months of her life, who had also come to stay.

I remember Win as being a very comfy, smiling old lady, although she was actually only in her late fifties when I was born. The thing that strikes me about her now when I look at her on earlier photographs is quite how stunningly beautiful she was when she was young, and that my own daughter, who of course she never met, looks uncannily like her.

She died of a stroke, possibly as a result of the side-effects of an anti-arthritis drug, at Chesterton Hospital in Cambridge in 1983. She was 79 years old. Her ashes were scattered in the fields near Dry Drayton.