Photographs have the power to stop the family historian in their tracks as images can powerfully evoke the spirit of the time and add an enthralling visual element to one’s research. One such picture that made me pause and want to find out more was a portrait from the early 1930s of a lady motorist sitting behind the wheel with a sturdy looking dog on her lap. The open-top machine, the driver’s fur coat and her leather gloves all give the impression of a well-to-do woman posing for the photograph to be taken.

I was using TheGenealogist’s Image Archive at the time when I came across this picture of Lady Iris Capell. A few clicks later and several other photos of her caught my imagination and made me want to find out more. I then ran a fuller search for her in order to see what other images were held in this database of people and places and soon I had a number to review.

Lady Iris, it would appear from various of the photographs returned, had spent some of the First World War in France where, from her uniform, she had nursed British soldiers. One of these wartime images had her in nurses garb, gamely playing cricket with the soldiers, while another had her sitting on the lawn in front of the military hospital in Normandy taking a break from her work and chatting with two other nurses. In shot, in the background, was a boxy motor ambulance from the era and an architecturally interesting building.

A recent extra feature added by TheGenealogist to its Image Archive is the ability to see where the historical pictures in the database are located. A modern map now appears underneath the historical image, along with the street view where it’s available. This means that the family historian researching their ancestor’s area is able to compare the picture from the past with how the area looks today. In the case of the wartime hospital we can see Le Tréport, Normandy has been identified as the building.

Returning to the first picture from 1932, where Lady Iris was sitting in the driver’s seat of a motorcar, it crossed my mind that it could have been staged and may have been someone else’s car acting as a prop for the fur-coated lady and the dog to sit behind its wheel. That, however, was not giving her the credit that she was due, as I learned from another image of the aristocrat. In the next photo she was captured in more practical clothing, this time perched on the bumper of her vehicle and the caption revealed that she was a keen sporting motorist. This image had been captured at Torquay in Devon on 1 March 1932, when Lady Iris was a participant in the RAC British Rally. Obviously a dog lover, her canine companion shared the limelight again, while another large dog had its head out of the passenger side window.

I was intrigued and set off to do a little research in an attempt to find out more about the intrepid Lady Iris Mary Athenais de Vere Capell. Born in 1895 and passing away in 1977, Lady Iris was the daughter of the Earl and Countess of Essex and had a sister, Lady Joan, who would marry the politician the 1st Viscount Ingleby. The two girls also had an elder half-brother, Algernon, who would inherit his father’s earldom to become the 8th Earl of Essex.

The children’s father, George Capell, 7th Earl of Essex, had been married twice. His first wife, and the mother of his son Algernon, was Eleanor Harriet Maria Harford (1860–1885) whom he married in 1882. It was to be a very short marriage as Eleanor died in 1885, in the year that followed her son’s birth. Some eight years passed and then the 7th Earl remarried to the American heiress and socialite Adele Grant, daughter of the late David Beach Grant of the Grant Locomotive Works, a New York railway magnate. A search of the marriage records on TheGenealogist reveals that the wedding was registered in the last quarter of 1893 in the district of St George Hanover Square, London. The ceremony took place at St Margaret’s Westminster in the grounds of Westminster Abbey.

The family seat missing from the maps
These, my research told me, were the parents of the lady motoring competitor. The family seat, I discovered, was at Cassiobury House near Watford in Hertfordshire and had been in the family since the reign of Charles II. Wanting to find out where this house was located I turned to TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer and began searching. There were no results on the modern map, indicating that it was likely to be one of the 1,200 large country houses that had been demolished since 1900. A search of the historical map layer, however, on this versatile tool easily located the Earl of Essex’s one-time house set in its own parkland. This interface, with different map layers all georeferenced to the same coordinates, allows users to see areas that have been submitted to change over time. In the case of Cassiobury the Map Explorer quickly reveals the extent to which urbanisation has changed the area, especially when selecting the Bing Satellite Hybrid map as the modern map layer. Urban roads, filled with housing, now fan out across areas formerly known as The Wilderness, Home Farm and Bellmount Wood. It is also possible to select tithe records as a record set, which reveal that in March 1844, when it was part of the survey, Cassiobury was tithe-free land.

A recent extra feature added by TheGenealogist to Map Explorer is the ability to also see some images of what our ancestors’ districts had once looked like. With the addition of pictures of period photographs of street scenes and parish churches, where researchers’ ancestors may have been baptised, married and buried, the map interface now allows TheGenealogist’s subscribers to select this as a record set layer. The historical pictures in the database on TheGenealogist are now shown with their locations pinpointed on the map. Once the View Record is selected underneath the historical image, as we have previously seen, the user can also view a modern map and street view (where it’s available) so that the family historian researching their past family’s area can compare the picture from the past with how the area looks today. In the case of Cassiobury House, the large house that we can now see in the old photograph with genteel ladies playing croquet on its lawn, is like a ghost from former times.

In 1916 the seeds of Cassiobury’s destruction were sown when, aged 58, Lord Essex was run over by a taxi; he died on 25 September at Newmarket in Suffolk. Cassiobury House had already seen some of its land and artworks sold off in 1909 as the upkeep of the estate was becoming increasingly expensive back then. At that time a sale of 184 acres of parkland was made to Watford Borough Council for its housing needs at the beginning of 20th century. With the death of the 7th Earl the family were then faced with large death duties to pay on top of the expense of running their estate and so six years later on the Dowager Countess and her stepson, the 8th Earl, put the house on the market. Divesting themselves of the contents, no buyer was found and so in the next few years the house was stripped of its interesting carvings and some of the bricks were sold for reuse even as far as America. Finally, in 1927, the old house was completely demolished.

By referring to the Peerage, Gentry & Royalty records on TheGenealogist we can find Lady Iris’s half-brother, who had become 8th Earl, recorded in Burke’s Peerage from 1921. It would appear from the note at the very end of the entry that Algernon, the 8th Earl of Essex, was now resident at Bodenham Manor in Herefordshire, a house that was likely leased and not owned by him.

Company director
At the start of World War Two, Lady Iris was now a senior figure within the Women’s Volunteer Service (WVS) ranks. She was also a director of an engineering firm and a keen motor racing competitor, and so it is not surprising that she turned her hand to organising racing drivers into a transport and despatch service. We can see that Lady Iris described herself as a ‘Company director, Private’ when she was asked to provide her details at the time that the 1939 Register was being compiled just as war had broken out.

Looking for other records which identify her as a businesswoman we are able to find her included in the passenger lists on TheGenealogist for 1951, which records the 55-year-old ‘Director’ Iris Capell as travelling on the Canadian Pacific shipping line’s Empress of France to Quebec from Liverpool.

When researching our ancestors we can use a number of other documents to find out where they had lived, and this is also the case with Lady Iris. With the demise of her family home, Cassiobury House, we can note that she would seem to have had a number of addresses of her own in the next few years. One resource that we can turn to is the 1921 Census Substitute on TheGenealogist. This record set reveals that in that year Lady Iris was resident at 3a Ebury Street, Pimlico.

The 1939 Register has then given us her abode in Kensington at the end of that next decade when she was at Empire House, Thurloe Square, Kensington. This matches closely with an address which was recorded in the Peerage, Gentry & Royalty records on TheGenealogist. Here the 1938 Webster’s Royal Red Book documents the street as Thurloe Place rather than Thurloe Square and adds the information that it was in SW7. Empire House is also published as her address in the 1939 edition of the Royal Blue Book directory. However, in the Trades, Residential and Telephone directories on TheGenealogist we can find an alternative home for her in the 1939 Kelly’s Directory of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire where Lady Iris is resident at White Cottage, North Heath, Chieveley, Newbury – perhaps this is her home in the country while Empire House was her ‘town’ address as both date from the same year. By the time of her voyage in 1951 to Canada the passenger list had her last address in the United Kingdom recorded as being at 103 Vicarage Court, London W8.

This brief research project began with an interesting picture of a woman and her dog in the driver’s seat of an open topped 1930s car. TheGenealogist’s Image Archive and its Map Explorer then revealed the ghost of the family’s stately home that had been lost under the urban development of Watford, showing how useful these resources can be in adding visually to family history research. By referring to other record sets a number of addresses have been obtained that could be used to research even further into the aristocratic company director, dog lover and motoring enthusiast.