Joy

1944 August Joy and Ray

Here is Photo Number 2 for the February Photo Collage Festival.

It is of my first cousin once removed Joyce Isabel and her husband Ray Jeffery.

Joy was more of an Auntie to me being my mother's first cousin.  

Joy's mother Belle and my mother's mother Kit were twin sisters.

Apparently I look a lot like Joy.

Joy married Ray in 1942.

Joy very kindly gave me a beautiful ring of hers and I wear it on my left hand on the middle finger.  It is very difficult to remove!  The inside of the ring is inscribed with the words "To my darling Bub" and then the dates 22.10.44 - 29.11.44.

I always thought this was connected to the birth and death of their first child - Robert William Jeffery but I have looked up his death in the NSW BDM index and he died in 1943.  

This was during the war years so I wonder if the dates relate to their second honeymoon.  Going through an old photo album of Joy's it does seem to fit.  They spent it in Katoomba - a popular place for our family holidays.

Ray (according to the Nominal Roll for WW2) was a Private.  He enlisted 23 July 1942 at St Ives.  He was discharged 24 January 1946 at the age of 25.

I was beginning to despair of finding any record of the Wingfields Cake Shop in Newcastle but have finally found something on Trove. An advertisement in Positions Vacant for a pastrycook on 18 March 1953 in the Sydney Morning Herald.  It has an address 685 Hunter Street Newcastle. And Glenn has kindly remembered it here on this blog. 

I have googled the street view, as one does, and it now seems to be an Adult Shop.   

My mother, her mother, cousins, and Aunt will be spinning in their graves I suspect.  

Ray might be having a bit of a giggle.