Kate

 

This is a photograph of my grandmother, Kate Kellam, which must have been taken sometime around 1900, a few years before she married my grandfather, Albert Beanland. Catherine, who was always known as Kate, was born in the small town of Morcott, in Rutland in March 1877, to Albert and Catherine Kellam, and whilst she was still young, the family moved to South Wales, where Albert became a small grocer. This comparatively settled start to her life was thrown into disarray by the death of her father in 1891, when she was just 14 years old. The grocery shop was sold, and Kate, along with her mother and sister, Mary Ann, began to move around the country, taking up a variety of jobs including waitress and barmaid work. It was whilst working as a barmaid in Keighley, that she met my grandfather, Albert Beanland, and they were married in April 1903. A year later, Amy, the first of her two daughters, was born, and in 1911, my mother, Gladys, was born. Shortly after the birth of my mother, the family moved the short distance from Keighley to Bradford, and it was in Bradford that Kate died in 1960, aged 83.