Louisa Malvina Hardy
Louisa Malvina Hardy was born at Stanley in the Falkland Islands on 7 May 1877, daughter of Frederick Hardy and Eliza Congdon. She was baptised at Holy Trinity on 26 August 1877, when her father was a bricklayer. Her parents were both English. Her father had come out in 1864 as a private of the Royal Marines in the islands' small garrison, and he stayed on as a bricklayer and mason. She was the second daughter of that name: an older sister, Louisa Ann, had died at sea in 1871.
Stanley in her childhood was a working port at the end of the world. Ships came out of Cape Horn dismasted, leaking or with their crews half dead and put in there because there was nowhere else in that ocean that could repair a hull or treat a man, and the merchants of Stanley had a reputation across the merchant marine for what they charged to do it. Some ships never left; the harbour still holds their hulks. That trade is how a Norwegian seaman came to be in the Falkland Islands. Her mother died when she was twelve. On 22 November 1894, at seventeen, she married the master mariner Olav Aslachsen at the Baptist Tabernacle in Stanley.
Her children then map the rest of her life better than any document about her does. The first, Valborg, was born in the Falklands on 8 September 1895, while the couple were living on Keppel Island. The second, Dena, was born in Argentina about 1898. Then came Elizabeth in Chile in June 1899, John about 1901, and Ethel at Punta Arenas in January 1903, the whole middle of her twenties spent in Chilean Patagonia while the Magellan Strait was still the road between the oceans. Then Norway, where a son was born about 1905, and then Cleveland, Ohio, where a daughter was born in 1906. She was twenty-nine and had given birth in four countries.
At Avon Lake she had four more, the last of them an infant named Herbert Bartle who was born in 1917 and lived twenty-nine days. Her own father had died the previous November at Punta Arenas, and her youngest brother there was called Herbert. Her name went sideways into her children rather than down: her son Olav carried Congdon, her mother's maiden name, as his middle name, and it was the census-takers, not her, who kept writing her Louisa M.
She died at Lorain, Ohio on 17 July 1948, aged seventy-one. Her death certificate is the document that reaches all the way back. Someone in the room could still give the clerk her father's name, Frederick Hardy, and her mother's as Louisa Congdon, a slip for Eliza. Without that line nobody would know where any of this came from.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Louisa Malvina Hardy (1877-1948)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/louisa-malvina-hardy-1877-1948-c6c988.