Hazel B.

When my daughter announced that she was going on a gap-year to Australia, I knew I was going to have to learn how email etc using the computer instead of just dusting it! Having never typed in my life, my first efforts at finding the letters on the keyboard was a nightmare, but I knew I had to find an interest to keep me going. Lurking in the bottom of a drawer was a typed-out family tree that my aunt had put together back in 1983 and so I decided that I would join Ancestry and put my family tree on there. I eventually learnt enough to be confident enough to offer my genealogy services to the Epsom and Ewell Local and Family History Centre, and in 2005 I became a volunteer there. Very quickly I also became involved in the Epsom and Ewell History Explorer website.
Even though I have lived locally since 1979, it was in 2008 that I first became properly aware of the Horton Estate Cemetery, which for some reason, because of the small headstones, I thought was a pet cemetery. At the history centre, after I was shown a photo taken by L. R. James in 1971 of Horton Cemetery, I was asked to see what I could find out about the names on the headstones. After I had managed to just about decipher four of them, JANE GILCHRIST, WILLIAM MUNK, FANNY HODGSON, and ANN BARROWS HOWKINS, I started researching and writing up their sad stories that were then posted on the Epsom and Ewell History Explorer website.
Early on, along with another volunteer Clive, whose interest is everything WW1, we started the mammoth task of researching all the names that were remembered on all the Epsom and Ewell WW1 memorials, and many that were remembered on their relatives’ graves. To date, together Clive and I have researched and written 605 WW1 life stories.
Then in 2020, Kev got in touch with me about his vision of doing a similar project for Horton Estate Cemetery burials and rest, as they say, is history……