Hello

I was very interested to find your website, particularly as a few days earlier I had e-mailed Birmingham's Spring Hill Library about an address that I found on my late grandmother's certificate while doing some family tree research.

In 1917 she gave birth to a daughter (my late aunt), out of wedlock, at an address which on the birth certificate was "5 Back 28 Spring Hill UD" and registered in the Ladywood sub-district of Birmingham.

I am very interested to know where this address was/is and particularly what "5 Back" means? Are you able to help? I'm trying to build up a visual picture of my grandmother at this house.

She would have been about 26, a "domestic servant" and probably went away from her family home in Enfield, Middlesex, to have the baby in Birmingham. A short time after the birth she returned to Enfield where she married a widower who had been left with a 2-year-old son.

I'd love to have the opportunity of visiting one of these back-to-back homes to sense what life was like for the people who lived there. I am looking forward to doing this with my grandmother's surviving daughter aged 79 who lives in Felixstowe, Suffolk.

Birmingham Conservation Trust and the National Trust have obviously worked so hard to restore this courtyard. It is encouraging to see working class history being saved in this way. There should be much more of it.

I'm sure that I will find the trip a moving experience, picturing my poverty-stricken grandmother trying to scrape an existence, and living at a time when having a child out of marriage would have been considered a disgrace on the family.

As yet I do not know why my grandmother chose Birmingham. She may have already been working there as a domestic servant but it seems she was in Enfield in the years running up to 1917 and then immediately after. She married in Enfield in 1918.

Regards and best wishes,
Christopher Payne, (Ipswich, Suffolk, UK).