Mary Margretta Eliza (Lizzie) Roberts was born the week her grandmother Phoebe Maria Roberts died, on 7 March 1880, probably at Bounds Farm, Dedham. Like her sisters she attended Ardleigh school. 

In about 1900 the twenty-year-old Lizze went to live at the Felixstowe guesthouse run by her aunts Maggie and Kitty Simson, at 3 Princes Terrace, Cavendish Road. Lizzie helped her two spinster aunts, working as assistant housekeeper. 

On 25 October 1904 she left the guest house to marry Alpheous (or Alphaeus, or Alf) Starling, a grocer from Fordham in Cambridgeshire (born 30 June 1881), and her sister Alice (my grandmother) took her place at Princes Terrace. 

In 1911, Lizzie and Alf Starling were living at Foulsham in Norfolk, where Alf was a ‘gardener domestic’. 

In 1921 they were in London, living at 39 Tanner Street, Bermondsey and Alf was head horsekeeper at a brewery in Tower Bridge Road

Alf Starling died in Camberwell in March 1939, aged just fifty-seven. The women in the Roberts family always seemed to live long lives, however, and none more so than Lizzie. Six months after Alf’s death she was still living in Camberwell, in Upland Road, with her children Ena and Jim. She survived the longest of the five Roberts sisters and died at Eastbourne few days from her hundredth birthday in February 1980.

Alfred George Starling was born at Foulsham, on 3 February 1911. He married Rosina Baker (1913–93), at Camberwell in 1937, and in 1939 was living at 5 Braeside Court, Forest Hill Road, Camberwell. He died at Bromley, Kent, in July 1985. 

Frederick James Starling (known as Jim) was born at Thetford on 13 April 1913. In the 1950s and 60s Jim ran a guesthouse at 11 Hartington Place, Eastbourne which, in memory of his mother and maternal grandfather, Frank Roberts, he named The Bounds, after the Essex farm where Lizzie grew up. He married late in life and and died at Eastbourne: like his sister Ena and brother Jack, in 1993.