Finding Ophelia

One of the things I was most intrigued to find out was what the RHS stood for. Having found Ophelia’s birth record, it was still not entirely clear, the H had me stumped. Through asking online forums I had a whole lot of guesses to go with, but personally, although it’s maybe the stranger of the options I believe that her name was Ophelia Rosalind Harryann Stephenson Stuart.

Born February 16th 1896 in Aberdeen. I imagine it was a pretty unusual name for the time and location. It appeared that Ophelia was an only child of a doctor and a dressmaker. All of the medical related scraps were making sense now.

Now I had a thread to pull and suddenly I find I’ve lost an entire Sunday to trawling archives, squinting over aged cursive handwriting and buying copies of historical documents. The more information I found the quicker I found the next source, it was addictive, but sadly it wasn’t painting a happy picture.

As I stared at my laptop screen, the image I had built in my mind of an introverted but eccentric victorian/ turn-of-the-century lady who studied medicine and was a prolific painter and sketchbook keeper fell apart. Ophelia had died in 1915, aged only 19.

Saddened to learn of Ophelia’s shortened existence, I realised how lucky I was to have picked up her book. It surely was at least a couple of year’s work to create and she couldn’t have had time to make many.

It seemed that Ophelia had left Aberdeen and relocated to Lanchester by the time of the 1911 census, where she was recorded as a ‘student’ aged 15. She was also registered as Rosalind rather than Ophelia. I wondered if the embossed Eccentric Scrapbooks were a gift from a relative who chose to use her full name and if she herself preferred Rosalind.

Only a few years later Ophelia R. Stuart was listed among the dead of October -November 1915, followed shortly after by her father John in January 1916.

Her mother Sarah died many decades later in 1956 in Edinburgh, which explained the book ending up at an antique fair in the Capital. I thought about how precious these scrapbooks must have been to Sarah after Ophelia passed. Ophelia must have spent hours selecting and curating the cuttings for each page. Looking at the pages, you can see her eye for detail, for layout and composition and the the creative personality of the Eccentric Scrapbooker.

I sat back from my screen and opened the book, browsing the pages again. How strange that I felt such a connection to a girl who had passed away over a hundred years ago, a girl who would have been ages with a great-grandmother I’d never met, a girl who despite being the end of her family line was remembered over a century later.

Even though I had so many details, her name, her parents, birth and death, I wanted to know more. Something that was concretely Ophelia not just a statistic in the census or a name in a list of the dead. I wanted something that told me who she was. The book already told me so much but I was hooked. I wondered if a photograph of her even still existed.

Ophelia’s mother passed in 1956 with no other children to leave her daughter’s books to. It appeared that her belongings must have been passed to another relative if the two books were to only surface in 2018. The antique dealer who sold me the book provided no further details of the origin of the books. Perhaps they came from a house clearance of one of Ophelia’s cousins. I feel that I’ve hit a block with my research, I’ve reached the end of all the threads I could find to pull, but I hope to find more.

For now, the book itself has much more to reveal. The logos Ophelia collected are already painting an image of her life, her father’s medical background is clearly there. Many of the logos have had the brand name cut out, making them hard to identify, but I’m sure that with further detective work I can find out more about her.