Family memories, from Fay Hampson

My great great uncle Thomas Hampson was born around the middle of the 19th century. He was brother to Henry, born 1845, who was my grandad Herbert Hampson's (of Hampson's Charles Street bakery, Wrexham) father.

Thomas Hampson was a jute merchant in Liverpool. He lived in Min-yr-Afon at Overton Bridge. The house still stands today.

The Leader:

He had two daughters, Mary, known also as Minnie, and Deva. The photograph above, probably taken at Min-yr-Afon, shows them in a well turned out horse-drawn trap.

On reaching adulthood Deva kept a boarding house in Wallasey and Minnie lived on the Wirral in what was known in the family as "a large house".

Minnie had a son, Cecil, and Cecil had a son called Robert. My auntie Gwen moved to Canada after the Second World War and in the early 1970s her neighbour went on a skiing holiday to Austria. Going up in a ski lift she started chatting to a man, who by an extraordinary coincidence turned out to be Robert!

My oldest brother remembers that when he was a boy in the early 1950s he visited Min-yr-Afon with grandad long after the property had left the Hampson family. He remembers the beautiful house and grandad chatting with Binnie Bell, who owned not only the house, but also a successful transport business.