Helen Frances Wren

First Generation

The grandmother who remembered everything

Helen was born in the spring of 1934, the eldest of four, and grew up in the farmhouse where the reunions are still held. Neighbours say she could name every cousin to the third degree before she was ten — a gift the whole family would come to rely on.

In 1962 she began the shoebox archive: every photograph dated, every face named on the back in pencil. Without that shoebox, there would be no Ferngate Lineage. She ran the first reunion in 1988 and insisted, every year after, that no chair stay empty.

See Her on the Tree