Fanny Thomasine Bishop was my great grandmother on my paternal grandfather’s side. I feel like I ‘know’ my maternal great grandmothers; there are photographs and my mother shared memories of these two women. In the early 1990s, I was in contact with Fanny’s granddaughter but their lives didn’t overlap and she could not contribute anything. Fanny lived until 1921 and even though the family were very much working class, it seems usual that not a single photograph has survived, or at least not one that I have been able to locate. Everything that I know about Fanny has had to come from documentary research. She does flit in and out of the records, largely through the lives and many deaths of her children but to me, she remains a shadowy figure. Yet she intrigues me and I would love to know her better. In an attempt to understand and appreciate the life of a women who experienced many tragedies, a woman who struggled with poverty, a woman who must have possessed incredible resilience and who only legacy is her descendants, I decided to try to write her story.

I can only imagine what she looked like. Although I don’t have a photograph of her, I do have photographs of two of her children and three of her grandchildren. I also have photographs of her father and his siblings, her grandfather and, incredibly, her great grandfather, who lived to be ninety two, dying the year after Fanny was born. I am ambivalent about the use of AI. I have serious concerns about its impact on the creative industries and on the environment. I do however acknowledge that it is here and here to stay and perhaps I should be trying to understand it and through that understanding, be aware of its uses, its pitfalls and the ethical connotations. I can use those photographs of Fanny’s relatives and ask an AI agent of choice to create a period photograph that, in its opinion might be consistent with what the daughter/mother/niece of the uploaded photos might look like. Confession time, I tried this. The result was unnerving. Physically I strongly resemble my mother but I could see a resemblance to me. I asked someone who they thought the AI generated image looked like (without telling them that it was potentially anything to do with me) and they immediately named one of my daughters and not the one that looks most like me. I am not going to upload the result here, not even clearly watermarked ‘created using AI’. It isn’t something that I feel comfortable doing.

As part of investigating Fanny’s life, I considered her schooling and remembered that I did have a school photo that was given to me in connection with Fanny’s husband’s family, who lived in the same village. There was no date on the image and no names but it was meant to include the grandmother of the person who sent it to me and she was two years younger than Fanny. I investigated the schoolmaster, who was in post from at least 1871-1901. In this picture he looks to be in his late thirties or early forties, making the picture about 1870-1880. Unfortunately, school photographs look fairly similar from 1870-1910 and I don’t have the original to examine photographic techniques, or to enable me to research the photographer’s name. Fanny was likely to have been at the school from 1874-1882. So I have scrutinised this photo and if she’s in this photo I know which girl I would vote for. I would bet on which ones were her younger brothers too but I could be totally wrong. The resemblances I think I am seeing and resemblance is a tricky thing, might be because members of Fanny’s husband’s family would have been at the school at this time. So, are the circled children below my great grandmother and her brothers? I wish I knew.

I did enhance the child who could be Fanny, or indeed any number of other people and compared it to a picture of my father, her grandson, at a similar age. It has made the girl very blurry but I am happy with my guess, even though the words ‘clutching at straws’ come to mind.