The story of the rescue of the crew of the Northern Belle and the loss of nine Margate men gets a wider audience.
Family History Detective Kit
Researching family history can be a long process but it can be so very well worth while and I’d encourage anybody to have a go, to learn about their roots.
To help us as we spend long hours slaving over a hot computer endeavouring to track down elusive ancestors, I have developed the Family History Detective Kit.
The Elephant Trainer and the Missing Husband
John William Benjamin Emptage was 20 when he married Emily Dixon Philpott, 17, in 1876 in Margate. In 1881 they were together with their young daughter but, as far as the records show, that was the last time the family was together and John William had disappeared. What had happened to John and what came next for Emily?
Child Migration
For more than 100 years, child migration schemes removed children from their families and friends and the places they knew. The children were sent to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia. Supposedly to give children with poor lives a better chance, it was also a means of increasing the population of these still new countries. At least three of the children were Emptages.
Ann Phoebe Emptage nee Hopkins
Ann Phoebe Hopkins was brought up in Canterbury, inland from the Kent coast. So the life she experienced in Margate after she married Alfred Burnett Emptage, a mariner and lifeboat man, was quite different from anything she had experienced previously or could even have imagined.
Gathering 2018: The Album
The full album of Gathering photographs, taken by Andrew Emptage. Enjoy!