Book of Life

Family Tree Service

LAURA PHILLIPS, my maternal grandmother.  My father said that she was an orphan, taken from the Workhouse and raised by a woman known as Auntie Annie Phillips in Birmingham.  Using Laura's marriage certificate and the listings of births, marriages and deaths, I discovered that, in fact, she was the daughter of Walter Phillips and Polly Broomhall, born in 1887.  Polly disappeared shortly thereafter, and during the 1890's, Walter moved to  Lancashire.  He remarried and had three other children, before dying in 1904 of TB.   By 1901, Laura was a boarder with a family named Oliver and working as a whip-maker.  In 1911 she married my grandfather, Edward Cogzell.  Together, they had two sons, my uncle Norman and my father, Edward, who between them had eight children.  Laura lived in Birmingham all her life, dying in 1959 at age 72.

PHILIP HAMMER, my husband's maternal grandfather, was born in Charlestown, St Austell, Cornwall in 1870.  He apprenticed as a cooper, but according to the 1901 census also worked as an insurance agent.  In 1907 he married Ellen Inch (whose father, John, was also a cooper) in Charlestown, where he was working as a cooper again. Philip and Ellen had two daughters, Bertha and Phylis and two grandsons, Morris and Stanley. Philip died in 1951 at the age of 81.  My husband has inherited his grandfather's musical talent.  Several generations of the Hammer family were recorded in a Bible, which proved to be an invaluable source of information in tracing this branch of my husband's ancestors.