Mary Eleanor

In 1882, a ten-year-old American girl was sent to live in a country whose language she did not speak, with relatives she had never met. That country was Wales, and the little girl was Amey Jane Lewis, who lived with her aunt Susannah in Borth, Ceredigion. Amey grew up to become the wife of a great sea captain, Thomas Jones, and had three children, six grandchildren, and fourteen great-grandchildren. In 1930, by which time she was a grandmother, Amey wrote down her memories of her first year in Borth as a little stranger, using a pseudonym that spells 'ME', and now, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Amey's birth, Lesley Jones (one of her great-grandchildren) has written a foreword to that memoir and it is now available for a wider audience to read. The account is now over ninety years old and describes life in a small Welsh village 140 years ago. For a historian, this can only be gold dust. For a descendant, it's priceless.

'Mary Eleanor' tells us about the everyday life of a child in a small fishing village in nineteenth-century mid-Wales in fascinating detail. We hear about everything from the kind of petticoats worn by the women as they did their spring cleaning, to local superstitions including folk medicine, to the regular trips as a junior member of the household to collect butter from the farm or to harvest potatoes from the family's two rows on the hillside. This is focused social history; shoes were made to last because the sole was outgrown before the upper, which was made separately. An entire village collaborated to catch and share fish for an entire season. The day-to-day life of this village is encapsulated in this little book as if it were under a microscope!