Wednesday 7 June 2017

By gone St. Antonin

Hi Val and Malc
This photo was given to me by Christiane Loisel who was brought up in St Antonin but now lives near St Omer.
 
Her grandfather Gaston Cabanes was a carpenter in St Antonin with 4 employees.  He kept notebooks recording events in St Antonin which she knows were given to someone interested in local history, but she does not have the person's name.
 
Gaston died of tuberculosis and his two youngest children also contracted it and died. His older two children were sent away for a cure, presumably to an isolation hospital as we had in the UK, and their mother couldn't keep on the 4 employees and had to resort to cleaning jobs to survive.
 
This photo was among the effects of Christiane's mother Denise Cabanes when she died. At the time she lived in the Place Bessarel and she was one of the two older surviving children of Gaston.  
The photo has obviously been enlarged and part of the date and message has been cut off, but this is all we have.  It looks as though it could be somewhere in the Bessarel area, still not fully recovered in the 1940's from the devastating flood of 1930.
 
Anyway this led me to add these two slides to the end of my slideshow: