When the town is named after you.

A scruffy card kept with reverence for 130 years. It is one of only two remaining items of correspondence between my great great grandfather and his cousin John, who emigrated to the USA in 1834. The cousin arrived in the USA a poor man, and died very wealthy, having become a well known building contractor in Chicago. John Sollitt, the sender of the card, was a carpenter trained by his maternal grandfather in Yorkshire. John's father, was a descendent of refugee Huguenots. He worked as stone mason on restorations of York Minster and Westminster Abbey.

The town of Sollitt is now just a small blip to the south of metropolitan Chicago, but John Sollitt paid for the railway line to go through this small settlement, so they named it after him. John lost his first two wives to cholera and married his third wife in his 60s and lived until he was 81. He raised 11 children. 

Charles, my great great grandfather died relatively young, aged 58, only 6 months after he received this card. This left his wife and remaining two children, daughters, to run the family business. This was a large hotel in the popular seaside resort of Scarborough. Two very different lives, separated by an ocean and yet still close in sharing their family news.