Frances “Fanny” Louise, or Louisa, Frodsham was born in Liverpool in 1849, to Edward Parr Frodsham and Mary Manlove Taylor. In 1876, about three years after Benjamin’s first wife, Charlotte, died, Fanny and Benjamin were married in St. Michael's, Toxteth, in the parish of Walton on the Hill, Lancashire. Two children were born before they left England for Canada, Rose and Frederick Charles. The family, minus the oldest son, Frank, sailed on the Rolling Polly, and arrived, by train and barge, to Portage La Prairie, where Fanny gave birth to twins, Bernard West and Dorothy, who died after two months.
After Ben and his son Willie had claimed their land and built a log house, Ben returned to Portage La Prairie to bring the family to their homestead – Rose Vale. Their belongings, taking 12 to 15 carts, included a piano, a rosewood desk, china and glassware and family heirlooms, probably easing the move for Fanny. There was no running water in the house and with single pane windows, there was ice on the inside of them during the winter.
Frederick Charles was the last in the family to be born in England. In 1909, when he was twenty-two, he was living at home with the family. By 1904 he was living in Austin, Manitoba, west of Winnipeg, where he was a school teacher.
In 1913, when he was thirty-four, he headed to the United States. When he registered for the draft, during World War I, he was working at Camp Fremont as a secretary for the YMCA in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. Camp Fremont was a temporary post on the West Coast of the United States for training National Guard units for combat.
By January 1920 he was living in San Francisco, a theological student at Divinity School. The following July he married Marion Menona Sanders in San Francisco. Marion, 1878-1938, born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, had come to the United States from Canada in 1897 with her family and settled in San Francisco.
Helen was born in Solsgirth and grew up at “Rose Vale.” Her older sister Rose taught Helen and her sister Ruby until Helen was eleven and then she and Ruby went to the local schoolhouse. After her father died in 1901, Helen lived in Birtle with her mother and sister and then spent time in England and various European countries before returning to Winnipeg. The three of them moved to Southern California about 1913. Helen worked as a church secretary, lived most of her life with her sister Ruby and never married. After she retired she lived at the Episcopal Home for the Aged in Alhambra. She outlived her sister Ruby by nearly thirty years and died in 1983 in Los Angeles. She was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery where her mother, Fanny, and brother, Frederick Charles, are buried.
