Alice’s Fanny Fust Research
I became interested in the
research of Fanny Fust because of my parents doing research about our family
tree. Because of my parents doing the research, I had an idea of what to do and
what to look for and how to go about doing the research. I was interested to
learn more about how Fanny lived and what the conditions were like back then
for people who were disabled.
Registry office
Me and dad drove to Bristol
to meet up with Andy at the registry office. We looked on the microfiche to
find the date of birth of Fanny Fust and we found it! While we were looking for
it, it made us feel ill, this was because of the way that the screen moved and
the writing was very small. You had to move something about to find the bit we
were looking for. I went home early with dad, became unwell because I had a
cold anyway. I was happy with how it was all starting off and excited to find
out more about Fanny Fust.
Tour of Bristol
We went on a tour round
Clifton in Bristol to see the houses that Fanny would have grown up in. They
were terraced houses, I was expecting it be more grand. We went to where the
Ostrich used to be – that’s where Fanny went to have strawberries and cream –
it is now a care home. What went around in my head was if the trees could talk,
I wonder what tale they would tell. There were still some big trees there – the
bigger the tree trunk, the older the tree is. Andy had brought along some old
maps of the site, which showed us the circle of trees. We also went in the
church that Fanny’s parents got married in, this was up a steep hill in the
centre of Bristol. I’m really enjoying the research and everything that we’ve
done with Fanny Fust.
Georgian House Museum
We went round the Georgian
House and we saw what it would have been like growing up at that time. We
learnt that the men had their rooms that they went into and the ladies had
their rooms to go into. Andy carried my manual wheelchair up and down the
stairs. We also learnt that the son of the family who lived in the house (in
the 18th century) had a learning disability, and was carted off to
live on a farm outside of Bristol. I wonder if the family sent him off because he
was disabled and would have brought shame on the family, or the family may have
thought he would have had a better life on the farm.
Research in Frome at
Openstorytellers
I came to the
Openstorytellers for the first time and we read the story of Fanny Fust and the
kidnapping that Simon Jarrett had shared.
