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The Ransons -Tailors of Lavenham in Suffolk.
I am descended from three generations of tailors who plied their trade in the business started by Jeremiah Ranson and his wife Elizabeth Jacobs in the 1840s. My grandfather's youngest brother Francis Lingard Ranson ran the business until his death in 1950 after which his daughter Kitty ran it as a haberdashery/general store until she died five years ago. Lingard Ranson was also an accomplished photographer and a well known local historian who did much to preserve the old fabric of Lavenham. The family shop, now converted into holiday flats, is instantly recognisable as the only flint built building on the Market Square.
My interest in our Ranson family history started when I visited Lavenham a few years ago when I bought a book of photographs of Old Lavenham published by Kitty Ranson. On the cover was a photograph of "Grandfather Ranson and four of his children at the time of Queen Victoria's Jubilee". This roused my curiosity and I wrote to Kitty to ask whether she could give me any information on the people in the photo and our family history. I did not receive a reply and I learnt later that sadly she would have received it at the time she entered hospital before her death. I started my research into census records and GRO indexes and eventually traced my way back to Jeremiah who was born in 1806. I was however unable to find any information about several of my great-aunts and uncles and their possible descendants.
I contacted Kitty's executor and he was able to give me many old photos which sadly are unnamed and other papers which included a small notebook which he said she had compiled in hospital listing known relatives and other Ransons who had contacted her after she had appeared in a Harry Seacombe Sunday religious programme broadcast from Lavenham some years previously. This was a tremendous stroke of luck and as a result I have been able to make contact with four previously unknown relatives and their descendants, including Douglas Ranson who introduced me to his daughter Val Henderson.
Val and I have subsequently researched in tandem and we have proved that she is descended from Jeremiah's eldest son William who left Lavenham to establish a tailors business in London whilst I am descended from a younger son James Robert who took over the Lavenham business.
Currently we are trying to trace the birth and marriage details of Jeremiah's parents William Ranson and Ann Jones. I have just had published a "help wanted" message in the Suffolk Genealogical Society magazine "Suffolk Roots" I end with a mystery. Douglas Ranson sent me a copy of an old daguerreotype photo (see photo at top) that Kitty had sent him some years ago after he had contacted her. She named the photo "Great-grandfather William and his four sons" and named the sons (L - R), William, James Robert (her GF), unknown, and John. She gives the age of James Robert as 14 which would date the photo as 1861. The mystery is that our proven research shows that the sons' father was Jeremiah and that he died in 1854 when James Robert was 7. So who is the mystery man? I thought it might be John Bishop, Elizabeth Jacob's second husband on the occasion of their wedding (they are all dressed for some celebration), but I found later that they married within six months of Jeremiah's death.
Dennis Ranson.
Dennis can be contacted by e-mail
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