RECENTLY seven certificates were left in the archive room of the Liskeard Old Cornwall Society in Stuart House which warranted further investigation.

The certificates were awarded to Miss Louie Victoria Fursman, who was born on her father's Charaton Farm, half a mile East of Pensilva, on January 26, 1901. Her only sibling was John Abraham Fursman, a half-brother 12 years older than her.

Louie’s father died when she was less than a year old and by 1911, she and her mother, a Widow aged only 48, had moved to a four roomed cottage in Pensilva village. Louie was aged 10 in the census of that year and received the first of three Certificates of Merit for Proficiency in Religious Knowledge from Pensilva School. She also became a member of the Pensilva Band of Hope that year.

Of the two more anonymously donated certificates were one, at the age of 14, when Louie enrolled as a member of The League of Young Worshippers at Pensilva United Methodist Church. Perhaps the most interesting one was signed by Ingeborg Molesworth-St Aubyn, President of the Cornwall Women’s War Agricultural Committee during WWI, it reminded Louie that ‘Every woman who helps in agriculture during the war is as truly serving her country as the man who is fighting in the trenches or on the sea’.

After the ‘Great War’ Louie’s half-brother John was farming at Keason, St Mellion, assisted by his wife Jane and two living-in employees, a Cattle Man and a Horse Man. Aged 20, Louie was also living in the 11-roomed farmhouse and assisted on the farm. She eventually married in 1928, settled in Bideford as a ‘Farmer’s Wife’, and died at the grand age of 90, having retired to Barnstaple.

By Brian Oldham, Liskeard Museum volunteer and Bard of the Gorsedh Kernow