Valentine from William Rowsell to Martha Bowers

William R. Rowsell (1806-1893), my ggg-grandfather, made the valentine pictured here for Martha Bowers ( -1860), his one true love. Oral tradition states that William wrote it during a trip to England in 1827.

I estimate the size to be approximately 16" square. It is very fragile, owing to its apparently having been folded in four (at least) for many years. The centre and most of the original edges are missing, though it is apparent that the centre and the outside had been made to look like lace.

A lot of painstaking work had to be involved to achieve the cut-outs around each heart; it is left to our imagination just how intricate the missing lacy bits were considering the tools William might have had. Even with an Xacto knife today one would be hard-pressed to achieve even a semblance of this precision.

This valentine was photographed surreptitiously in the summer of 2004, because the owner did not want any pictures taken. However, I felt because William was my great-great-great-grandfather, it belonged as much to me as to the person who had it. I’m glad I did.

Sadly I don’t know where the valentine is now. I hope it has been kept in good condition. The image is of very poor quality because photographing it had to be done quickly and quietly and was done with an early-model digital camera. Four quadrants of the framed valentine were photographed and the images stitched together later. Images of the four quadrants in which the text is much easier to read can be seen here.

The valentine had been mounted on a pink background and framed. A photograph of an unknown family had been mounted behind the missin center of the valentine. This photo was removed in photo editing. Not perfect, but the best I can do with the minimal tools I have.

The verse is beautiful and I had a go at transcribing it. Read it here. There are many places where I could not decipher the script. Luckily in 2022 a photocopy of a transcript made by my father, Reginald N. Rowsell, turned up. It was supplied to me by Notre Dame Bay Genealogy Queen Beverly Warford, who is sure I sent it to her. Must have been in a previous life because I have no memory of having ever seen it before. This text is shown beneath the image below.