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The picture was taken at my grandparents' engagement, around 1900. They had migrated from different villages in Romania some years earlier and met here. We were told that he was supposed to have gone to America to join his brother, but was cheated - another story. The matriarch in the centre is my late great-grandmother, the legendary Nurse Black. She was the first, and for a long time the only, Jewish midwife in Manchester. She kept records of the hundreds of births she assisted, of all social strata some of whom became celebrated politicians, artists, businessmen, etc. Usually she was paid in cash, sometimes in kind. Occasionally the parents were so poor, she left money for them. Her work took her on foot or bicycle all over the city until she retired just before World War II.