Nancie was working as Governess to four year old Mimi, daughter of wealthy heiress Jean Harris (nee Ferris) during the winter of 1937. She managed to see her old employer and lifelong friend Eleonore de Chabannes, Ebles de Chabannes and various other old friends. I think she met Brenda Johnston around this time who was to be another faithful friend. Brenda never married but had a longstanding relationship with a married man. Nancie was her confidante and they were still close in their eighties when Brenda lived in Elgin, Scotland with her sister, Jean.
In February of 1938 Jean took Mimi and Nancie to Fairford in Gloucestershire, where her Father's sister Henrietta lived. The house was called Mount Pleasant House. Henrietta had never married and was to die six years after this aged 89 in 1944. She had lived in the USA but eventually came back to the village she'd grown up in.
Her parents were John Naish Ferris and Henrietta nee Wakefield from nearby Cricklade. They married in1849. In the 1861 census John Naish Ferris is a Stage Coach Proprietor living at 99 High Street, Fairford, owning 28 acres of land and employing two men. He and his wife have three children : John Wakefield Ferris, 11, Colleen Ferris, 9 and Henrietta Ferris,7.
By 1871 they are living on a farm with 406 acres and employing eleven men and two boys. Far Hill Farm is today part of the Ernest Cook Trust (endowed 1952)and the present occupant of the farm, now 900 acres, was awarded the 2014 Cotswold Grey Partridge Trophy for conservation!
John Wakefield Ferris seems to have left Britain for the USA in about 1876. Certainly by 1880 the whole family appears in the US census for Novato, Marin, California. John is now 65 and a Farmer, his wife, Henrietta 61, 'keeps house' and daughter Henrietta is 25 and 'at home'. Daughter Mary 26 is 'visiting'.
In 1900 we find John Wakefield Ferris, aged 51, living in Novato with his two sisters, Mary C. (Colleen) and Henrietta. He is unmarried at this time.
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