George Robert WADDING

Margaret (Davis) and James WADDEN/WADDING’s third son, and the second George Robert (b.11 Sept 1887) married Anna Eliza (known as Elizabeth or Lil) MORRIS in 1918. (Note one of their witnesses was a Margaret LACY.)

George Wadding had played the double bass at the silent pictures as a young man in Wexford. He had been a printer with the paper Wexford People.  After being made redundant he found a job with the Waterford News. Once married he and Lil, who was from Wexford, settled at 18 St. Ursula’s Terrace, Waterford.

They had thirteen children.

Elizabeth, George’s wife, died in her late 40s, in 1944.

George died two years later on 5^th August 1946.

Both parents died young of brain haemorrhages and hypertension.  I wondered what had happened to this family of thirteen children.  The youngest children were still young when they were orphaned. It wasn’t until I found the obituary of son Luke, who died in 2014, that I learnt that the siblings stayed together through the sacrifice of the oldest two sisters who provided for them. As the oldest siblings left the household the next oldest remaining then looked after the younger children. It’s a remarkable story of family care and not unlike the previous generation of Waddings.