Sarah Howarth and her Swansea house, 1876

This mosaic was inspired by an 1876 colorized photo showing my great-great-grandmother Sarah Anne Hamlit Howarth. She is in front of the house she and her husband Joseph purchased that year on what is now 759 Marvel Street in Swansea. I wanted to bring to life a happy moment of immigrants sharing their success with their families in England.
I have been diving passionately into my family’s history, to discover the roots of my own life story. My mother’s history centers on Fall River, as both sides of her family immigrated there from England and Germany in the late 1800s. They all worked in the textile mills, and later brought vegetables to the city’s markets.
When my mother’s family moved into this house in 1931 it was still without central heating or plumbing. The Great Depression had begun, and it was a rough time and place for her to grow up. The farm had little usable infrastructure and went bankrupt while her father sunk into alcoholism- farming is not easy. Creating this mosaic has been for me an empathetic meditation about her challenges and their impact on her and her children.
For more Howarth stories and photos, see www.lindacundiff.net/lindas-mosaic-blog/the-howarths-of-swansea-and-fall-river-massachusetts.