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Arthur James Richardson, was born on November 27th, 1879 in London, England, the son of Edward and Emily (Mills) Richardson. Arthur's father was from Hounslow Heath, near London. His mother was from Croydon, England. Arthur went to Australia with them when he was a baby and returned to London when he was nineteen. There he met a young nurse, Martha Smith, while he was working near Guy's Hospital, and they married in 1900. They had two sons in England, and then emigrated to Canada where they had three more children. They eventually came to United States in 1915 and settled in Maryland where most of their descendants now live. The image above is from a photograph dated 1920 that was in the collection of his son, Ted. The Richardson family was living at 1609 Pratt Street, Baltimore then and shown is Ben on the fiddle, Ted on the saxophone and Myrtle on the banjo, with father Arthur playing his consertina, or "consertinia", as he always wrote.
Arthur James Richardson (1879-1967) wrote these letters in 1963, 1964 to his granddaughter, Edna Arthuretta Richardson. Although she had grown up just a few miles from where he lived, and had been named for him, he had never visited her and her siblings. She saw him only once in her life, for less than an hour, and that was about 1957 when he was visiting his wife's family who lived nearby. Interested in obtaining history of the Richardson family, she initiated a correspondence with him when she was grown and living in Florida. It is interesting that in the letters he used the eighteenth century meaning of "niece." Arthur's letters were handwritten in ink on yellow lined paper. He wrote them when he was 85 years of age and living in Catonsville, Maryland with his daughter, Myrtle. When reading these letters please be aware that he was schooled during the nineteenth century when there was not such a standardization of spelling and punctuation as we are accustomed to seeing today. The transcriber retained his original spellings but adjusted the punctuation and capitalization, mainly for ease of reading, but also because the method he used was unfamiliar. Please remember as you encounter Arthur's unique words that he was a man who could quote the Bible and Shakespeare, something most twenty-first centurions cannot.
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"RICHARDSONs from
Hounslow Heath ~ Letters from Arthur"
was published on 6 May 2002
and
Copyright © by Edna Richardson Barney. All Rights
Reserved.
Background graphics are courtesy of Ritva's Gallery.
