Rectory Lane Cemetery, Berkhamsted

Ida Marion Pearce was born in Alford in Lincolnshire on 17th November 1896 to Harriet White, then aged 31 and John Brooks, aged 34.  She was their third child.  By the age of four she was living with her grandparents in Stamford Lincolnshire, her mother having died in 1901 leaving her father to manage on his own. Her siblings stayed with their father.  By 1911 she was back living with her father at 40 Burghley House, Stamford along with her brother Harold and her mother’s unmarried sister – presumably there to help the family. In July 1922 she married Charles Pearce, a gas fitter from the Isle of Wight, and their only daughter, Phyllis Ann, was born the same year. He had been decorated during the 1st World War and pensioned out. Ida had been working in London, so perhaps that’s where they met. By 1939 the family had moved to Shrublands Road in Berkhamsted where Charles continued to be a gas fitter, evolving to work with gas heating rather than gas lighting.  The 1939 census gives Phyllis’ occupation as working in a stationery shop. Tragedy struck the family when first Phyllis in 1944 and then Ida in 1949 died. They share the same grave in Rectory Lane Cemetery.  Having lost his family, Charles left Berkhamsted.