While browsing in an antiques shop called The Collector’s Market in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 2017, I spotted a stack of old photograph albums. I was drawn to one that had a strong tooled leather cover with a brass clasp, so I bought it. There were 56 photographs inside, mostly studio portraits taken in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.
Fortunately, there was an inscription on the fly leaf that said, “Frank Repton fro [sic]: Bouverie, Ostend May 4th 1873.” Having grown up in Suffolk I wondered if Frank was related to the famous garden designer Humphry Repton, who was born in the county in 1752.
I thought that the album would be an interesting subject for me to research, and it turned out to be just that. Frank was born Francis Edward Repton in Dublin on 6 August 1854, to Lady Cecilia Pery and her husband George Repton.
They had 10 children, including Frank’s elder brother Bouverie. The Repton family moved in illustrious circles, and George became a minor canon of Westminster and priest in ordinary to Queen Victoria.
This led back to Frank’s great grandfather, who was indeed the garden designer Humphry Repton. I was delighted that my hunch had been proved correct.
Unfortunately, Frank didn’t have any descendants and the only connection I could find was his niece, Gladys Mervyn Repton, who died without issue in Eastbourne in 1977.
It’s possible that the album was among Gladys’ possessions when she died, and that they were sold off after her house was cleared. The problem was that I couldn’t prove it.
In 2021, I took a fresh approach and looked more closely at the photographs. Some of them were annotated on the back, and marked as being taken in Denmark, in Roskilde or Copenhagen. So I took a crash course in Danish.
One of them was labelled “Tante Therese Slomann, Gift Engelhardt”, which means “Aunt Therese (née Slomann) Engelhardt”. Eureka! Here was a lady with both her maiden name and married name included.
Although I searched the worldwide records on Ancestry and FamilySearch, I couldn’t find any tangible leads. So I did a general internet search and had my second ‘eureka moment’. I found an article about the Slomanns written in Danish by Birgitte Fogh on her blog. I emailed her and crossed my fingers for a reply.
In May 2021, I received an email from Birgitte, who is a retired Danish university librarian. She revealed that Therese was her great grand aunt on her grandmother Margrethe Slomann’s side. She was very excited to hear from me because she knew little about Margrethe’s family, and had no idea of a connection to Britain.
I sent scans of the images to Birgitte, who had never seen any of them before. She was able to identify some of the photographs from names on the prints, including Margrethe’s father Carl Victor Slomann. Working from more named images, Birgitte was able to expand her family tree and make some exciting discoveries.
She told me that Margrethe was born in Copenhagen in 1889, to Carl and his wife Petra. The name Slomann had intriguing origins. Carl and Therese’s father was Sally Wulf Salomon, who was born in Denmark in 1809. Sally was Jewish, but in 1831 he converted to Christianity and changed his name to Slomann.
Sally’s brother Victor became friends with legendary author Hans Christian Andersen, who mentioned visiting the Salomon family home in his 1833 diary. He remarked on how beautiful the Salomon sisters [one of whom, Betty, is pictured above] were.
In 1880, Victor’s daughter Emilie married the Danish novelist Carl Ewald, who like Andersen was renowned for writing fairy tales. They had two daughters, Karen and Ellen, before separating in 1885.
This connection was a wonderful discovery for Birgitte, because Ewald was the father of Poul Henningsen, a famous author, architect and designer.
In 1911, Karen Ewald married the Irish writer and poet Shaw Desmond. They lived in Twickenham, South-West London, and had two children – Jan who died aged 10 and Deirdre who was born in 1920.
Deirdre Desmond married three times, but we can’t find any descendants of her or a connection to Eastbourne. It’s possible that she annotated the photographs, but I don’t know how they ended up with the Repton family. I’m hoping to find someone connected to the Ewald or Salomon/Slomann families who can help.
It has been so satisfying to identify the people in the photos. The album has helped Birgitte understand her 19th-century family. She wrote to me saying, “Thank you so much – without you I would never have discovered this part of my family.”