Author: FindingOphelia

Graphic Design nerd.

Finding Ophelia RHS Stuart

The Eccentric Scrap Book by Ophelia R.H.S. Stuart

Last year while browsing the stalls of a Edinburgh antique fair I discovered the Eccentric Scrap Book. On a stall piled high with aged bric a brac sat a leather bound book with gold embossed letters boldly proclaiming ‘Eccentric Scrap Book’. Slightly curious, I picked up the notebook and carefully flicked through.

I was expecting the usual schmaltzy chubby cheeked angels, floral bouquets and wide eyed animals, something which I would cast an amused eye over and then return to the stall holder. But what lay between the leather cover surprised me – hundreds of neatly cropped brand logos, packaging and stamps all laid out beautifully. A wave of excitement went through me – this is a graphic designer’s dream! All these design references that would otherwise have been lost to time, a source of inspiration that no Pinterest search could uncover. Perfect for me to refer to when creating my next logo.

And so I became the owner of Ophelia’s Eccentric Scrap Book. The book sat on my night stand, I’d browse it before bed, wondering where all the elements had come from, had Ophelia traveled far to collect all this ephemera? How long had it taken to collect enough to fill this book? How many books had she produced? But mostly, what kind of person makes a book like this?

It seemed to me that this was the work of a graphic designer in the making – someone with an eye for composition, typography and small details. Someone who saw the artistry behind a brand’s logo or packaging design. I guessed, looking at the dates through out the book that she had made this book sometime in the late 1800s. It seemed unlikely that a woman of that time would have went on to design but perhaps she had created work not as a profession but as a passion. I imagined an antique shop somewhere displaying strange and beautiful illustrations with the signature Ophelia RHS Stuart scrawled in the bottom corner. I wanted to find them.

I took to google to search for ‘Ophelia RHS Stuart’, ‘Ophelia Stuart’ and ‘Eccentric Scrapbook’ with no luck. Yet I was sure there would be other books out there, it seemed unlikely to me that someone who had so obsessively maintained such a scrapbook would simply stop after one, there must be more somewhere. But how to find them?

A few months passed and my search for ORHSS had gone no further than a string of frustrated google searches. When a friend and fellow designer called round for dinner I showed him the book. “You should really do some research on this woman” he agreed, “It’s something special.” The thought burned away in my mind, having never been much of a detective I didn’t know where to start. It donned on me a few days ago, when joking that “there’s a sub-Reddit for everything” in an unrelated conversation, there really is a sub-Reddit for everything and if there was any information on Ophelia buried away in some obscure website then the Reddit community seemed like the right people to help dig it up. I messed around on my phone until I found a sub for family tree research. So here I am, less than 24 hours later with a lot more information on ORHSS, a lot more queries out in the ether of the internet awaiting responses and a lot more questions than I started with. I’ll update soon with my findings.

The Other Book

When I turned to R/Genealogy all I had was the name Ophelia RHS Stuart and a google search that had turned up a ‘Ophelia R Stuart’ who had died in Lanchester in 1915. It seemed like it must be her. I’d guessed that Ophelia must have been born between 1880 and 1900 from looking at the dates in the collaged pages, even back then the name failed to appear in the top 200 names for these decades.

Shortly after posting to Reddit I had a reply, someone with significantly better internet detective skills than me had found Ophelia RHS Stuart born in Scotland in 1896 in St.Nicholas, Aberdeen. Not only this but they had discovered a second Eccentric Scrapbook had been sold on Ebay.

The other book

The other book had sold roughly around the same time I had bought mine. I wondered if the seller had been at the same antique event. This second book had sold well over the bargainous price I had bought my book for. I emailed the seller a few times to ask if they could share my details with the buyer of the second book, I was sure that someone willing to pay over £100 for a scrapbook would have loved to know more about the creator as well. Sadly I haven’t heard back. This is partly why I have started this blog, if you are reading this and you too are the owner of an Eccentric Scrapbook then please get in touch! I’d love to exchange images of the pages.

Thankfully the listing contained a generous collection of photographs, showing the same, patiently clipped, carefully arranged mixture of branding and medical related scraps as my own copy. This book however appears to have more war related images, I imagine it might therefore be the later of the two books.

I wondered just how many books Ophelia had created, and where the others were – had they survived as well preserved as these two books had?

The Eccentric Scrapbook

A few pages from my copy of the Eccentric Scrapbook. Some of the brands appear multiple times though out the book. The owl logo in particular appears to be a favourite of Ophelia’s. It appears that Ophelia was interested in the illustration and design of the logos and would often cut out the brand name to create a negative space which she filled with coloured paper. Tartan shows up frequently in the compositions, perhaps showing a homesickness for her hometown of Aberdeen, or perhaps because her relatives still living in Scotland would send her scraps for her collection.

The book is crammed full of interesting scraps, far more than one girl could have possibly collected by herself, Ophelia must have had quite a collective of relatives and friends sending her clippings. It seems that a vast majority of the imagery comes from medical related products, presumably from her father.

Finding Ophelia

Ophelia’s birth record

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.

2021 Update

It’s been a while since I last posted.

Early last year I received a message through this site from two very lovely women, Elizabeth and Carolyne who found my site while researching their family tree. They have memories of their great aunt, who was Ophelia’s mother, living with their grandmother in Edinburgh.

The first thing they could confirm was that Ophelia went by her middle name, Rosalind, and that indeed the H in RHS is Harryanne. They also brought along wonderful family photographs, including this one of Rosalind and her mother.

Such a beautiful image, every bit the victorian lady artist. One of my first goals with my research was to put a face to the Eccentric Scrapbooker and now, thanks to Elizabeth and Carolyne, I can finally see the person who worked so painstakingly to create such a wonderful book.

We met up for a coffee together in between lockdowns and had a great discussion, I could really feel the passion these two women have for finding out more about their family and their delight in finding the book. Together we put together the pieces we both knew, they were able to confirm a lot of the details that I had found and rule out others.

It was such an exciting day, I’m afraid it’s taken me such a long time to write things up due to moving house and a pandemic, not necessarily in that order. I hope that at a future date we can meet again to see if there are anymore mysteries to unravel together.