Maria Danson, nee Rawcliffe and her granddaughter Annie Maria

This photograph of of my great-grandmother, Maria Rawcliffe started me on the ancestral trail. Her name appealed to me as it was an evocative mixture of down-to-earth Lancashire grit with echoes of a more flamboyant Latin nature. She looked a formidable lady from the one photograph I had initially of her. To give additional colour there was a, no doubt, apocryphal story that “granny’s dark looks” came from Spanish descent, after an Armada ship had been wrecked off the Fylde coast of Lancashire. All this captured my imagination and, as a child, I began weaving stories about her.