Elizabeth Graham

Elizabeth Graham was a Hull woman — baptised at Holy Trinity on the 31st of October 1810, and entered on the register under the pet-name the family kept for her, 'Betsey'. She was a daughter of George Graham and Charlotte, née Gainess, and grew up in the old town while it was still walled by its docks.

On the 1st of September 1831, at Holy Trinity, she married Samuel Wood, a Derbyshire man newly come to Hull and set down in the register as a mariner. Both of them signed their own names in a good hand — a small thing, but the record keeps it, and it tells against their daughter Mary Ann, who would make her mark at her own wedding a generation later. Elizabeth raised her family at Anne Street, in St Mary's parish: five children across the 1830s and 1840s, one of whom she buried at ten.

Samuel died in 1859 and left her a widow at forty-nine, and it is in her widowhood that Elizabeth comes forward on the page. She kept a shop — 'Shopkeeper', the 1861 census has her, at 3 Anne Street, with two working sons and a lodger. Ten years on she had taken in a grandchild: her daughter Mary Ann had died in 1866, and by 1871 Mary Ann's girl Ann Elizabeth Frith, twelve, was in the household — set down, as such children often were, as a 'niece'. By 1881 Elizabeth had gone to live with her son George, risen to manage the Vauxhall Tavern on Hessle Road, and the census writes her plainly at last: 'Widow of the late Samuel, General Carrier' — the trade her husband's varied entries had circled for fifty years.

Elizabeth died in 1886, aged seventy-six, having outlived her husband by twenty-seven years and held the family together through all of them. Her own people — the Grahams of Hull — are the wall above her; through her daughter Mary Ann, her line runs on into the Friths.