Dorothy Emma Cousens

Birthplace: Slough, England (source Passenger List ss Montrose 1933)

Birth registration last quarter 1898, district of Eton, Buckinghamshire - Dorothy Emma Middleton - Vol 3a, page 708

(Source Barbara Duncan)

Dorothy came from a large and prestigious family(*see below) in England.

• Her father, Henry Middleton (1851-1932) was the last Middleton to be born at Middleton Place Plantation, Charleston, South Carolina (a U.S. National Historic Landmark and a carefully preserved 18th-century plantation that has survived revolution, Civil War, and earthquake). He went to Cambridge University, England, and studied mathematics with James Clerk Maxwell, and tried to become an inventor. A contemporary of Thomas Edison, Henry believed deeply that Edison was merely a tradesman with vast resources to command, whose talent and importance as an inventor were greatly exaggerated.
• The plantation 'Middleton Place' was established in 1741 by Henry Middleton, later President of the First Continental Congress,
• and was home to generations of the family including Henry's son,
• Arthur Middleton, a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence;
• and his son: Henry Middleton, Governor of South Carolina and U.S. Minister to Russia;
• and his son: Williams Middleton, who signed the Ordinance of Secession

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleton_Place)

At 26 years old Dorothy married Gordon Cousens, age 40. They emigrated to Canada, where they lived in the country raising their four children and making a living running a silver fox farm. The Depression of the 1930s forced the closing of the farm.

Dorothy's former sister-in-law Peggy (first wife of Harry Cousens) lived in her retirement years in Hove, nr. Brighton, Sussex, England. Coincidentally Dorothy - after her husband's death in Canada - went back to England and lived a few miles from her sister Helen at 30 Adelaide Crescent, Hove 3 (Brighton, Sussex) and Peggy lived in the same building. When Dorothy fell ill with a sharp pain on one side, her sister Helen, with whom she had been visiting, sent her home in a taxi. Peggy checked in on Dorothy in the evening and the following morning was making her some tea, when she expired (in 1960) at age 62. Cause of death was not communicated to her daughter, Babs, but was probably a pulmonary embolism.