A private archive

The Trevorrow family

Seven generations, from the tin mines of St Just in Penwith to the gold mines of Grass Valley, California. Forty one people, a hundred and one things they did, and the photographs that survive.

This is a demonstration, so the passphrase is printed here: . On the real archive it would be whatever you choose, and it would not be printed anywhere.

The passphrase here is checked in your browser, which keeps out anyone who finds the address but not anyone who opens the developer tools. The built version checks it at the edge and sets a signed cookie, so the pages are never sent to a browser that has not passed. That is a real difference and it is worth saying out loud rather than implying.

Wikimedia Commons, CC0
The Trevorrow family
St Just in Penwith, and Grass Valley

Ivy Trevorrow

born Nankervis

1912 to 1997aged 85

At home; school cleaner, Pendeen, 1958 to 1975

Born
16 March 1912, Pendeen
Died
2 December 1997, St Just in Penwith

A Pendeen girl who married a Geevor man in 1934 and lived within two miles of where she was born for eighty five years. She is the archivist of this family without ever having used the word. Every letter, every photograph, every funeral card and every mine payslip on the Cornish side came out of two biscuit tins under her bed. She is also the woman a stranger's letter from California was walked up Nancherrow to in 1979.

Accomplishments

  • Kept the family papers for sixty three years1934

    In two biscuit tins under the bed, in order and labelled. Her granddaughter catalogues archives for a living because of those tins.

  • Fifty two years in the Pendeen chapel choirabout 1934

    The same choir as her husband, on the other side of it.

Married

Hedley Vingoe. Coal miner in cap lamp holding a pipe, dinner pail slung at his side, P V & K Coal Company, Clover Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky; from the 1946 federal survey of coal miners' housing conditions made when the U.S. government operated the mines.
Hedley Vingoe Trevorrow1910 to 19841934

Children

Kenneth Hedley Trevorrow1936 to 2009
Brenda Joan Oldsliving

An invented family, built to show how this works. The photographs are real public domain archival portraits of real people who are not these people, and each one credits its archive. Freely licensed portrait photography effectively stops around 1946, which is why the earliest generations are rich and the recent ones are empty mounts. On your own archive, those are where your photographs go. What is real and what is not.