Magdalena Brown

Magdalena Ireland Brown was generally known as Lena and we believe that Ireland was the surname of the midwife who delivered her.  Lena told me this herself although obviously someone had told her.  She lived to her 100th year and although outwardly frail she had an inner strength which saw her through two wars and two husbands.  Incredibly, she survived her first husband by over 76 years.  Albert Brember was killed on active service in Mesopotania in 1917 and his wife was left to bring up Christina (Ina), the child he never saw.  Lena did remarry after a couple of years and had a second daughter Mary with Richard Todd.  Mary also lost her first husband to war, killed as a tank commander in Normandy in the aftermath of the successful D-Day landings.

Interestingly her death registration notes her as "Magdalene formerly Magdalen".  She is also also Magaline, an obvious misspelling, in one of the censuses and Magdaline, the presumed target spelling, in another.  I can find no record of any other Magdaline in her ancestry but as she was one of the youngest of the family they had no predetermined names to use by that stage.  Almost inevitably she worked in the local spinning mill just as her parents and big sisters had.

Lena was married at the relatively young age of 20 but this was typical of wartime when couples would marry early because the man was going off to war.  I can't determine the exact dates when her husband left but feel certain that he wouldn't have been home to see his only child as he was in the Middle East theatre of war and died when Christina was only eight months old.  Two and a half years later she remarried, to Richard Todd who worked in the leather works in Kinghorn, and she had a longer time with him although she outlived him by a good margin as well.  She devoted a lot of her time to Church matters, especially the Women's Guild, and having met her I can confirm she was a really kind-hearted and cheery soul.

Her parents married in Kinghorn but both had come from the Wemyss area where all the rest of her ancestry is to be found.  The 1861 census which contained Magdalena's mother Christina was the first mention of Kinghorn anywhere in the trees.