I can still hear my mother's voice ringing in my pre-teenage ears, "His wife was a Hxxxx; there was a big family of them, and a right rum lot they were an' all." One of the penalties of growing up in a small town, where my parents had lived all of their adult lives ... and more, was that entrenched views of the morality of one's neighbours were inevitably passed down. These assessments were received by young ears and minds as truth, rather than mere opinion.
I was reminded of this the other day when I visited my homeland for a school reunion. One of those present was a man whose concerns and interests seemed to differ little from my own. He was a child of one of those large family groups about whom my mother had a declared 'opinion'. Although I have long since been of the persuasion to form my own opinions about people ... and to change them if I find I was wrong, I still recall, after nearly sixty years, what I heard in childhood.
One usually finds that a place called West something has a matching East something not far away; the same applies to North and South. I recall my amazement when I discovered the distance between North Elmham and South Elmham ... they are about 50 miles apart, one in Norfolk, the other in Suffolk. That surprise was nothing to what I felt when I realised how far West Derby is from the city of Derby. I've never found an East Derby; in fact, I haven't even looked for it. This week, I've learned quite a bit about West Derby. Much of the time I have struggled with a particularly challenging cluster of people in connection with the extended family of my great-uncle George, oft-mentioned here in recent weeks. This week's study was into the family of one of his military sons-in-law.
The registration district of West Derby lies beside, and appears to swamp, the city of Liverpool and, although someone might well have declared their place of birth as 'Liverpool', I found it necessary in my searches always to include West Derby as well. Its area includes Everton, and many other well-known suburbs. It was interesting to look at one short Everton street on Google Maps. Using the street view, I was greeted by the Liverpool - there, I've done it myself! - that I remember from my delivery days, with the doors and windows of most of the terraced houses secured with steel plates, and signs of life at only two or three of the twenty-odd dwellings. Switching to the 'earth' view, captured at a later date, I could see that the whole area has been flattened ready for re-development. Those houses on Venice, Viceroy, Vanguard and Vienna Streets are no more.
My mother's outspoken views (probably conditioned by her own upbringing and a small but firm family background) came back to me again, as I discovered that the father of my soldier had been married either two or three times. With the common name of James Davies, it was hard to be certain which entries in the records referred to the right person. When it came to marriages, the same sort of problems arose. Were the first two wives were one and the same: could Liza A in one census have been Agnes in the next?
I eventually decided that the marriage I'd found for a James Davies and Agnes Elizabeth Caven wasn't the right one after all, and that there were two others more likely to be the true couples, one to Eliza Ann Lindop, and the other to Agnes Conlan. There was also the need to fit in appropriate deaths, and deaths of former husbands, of course, and in the case of the third wife, Sarah Guy - formerly married to another James - which Sarah she had been before that marriage. Was she Watson or Wright? And to further confuse an already complicated muddle, there were step children - sometimes not called step- - to be taken into account as well.
By Wednesday evening, I decided to call a halt and spend the next day on other things. After returning home yesterday in a motorhome with a newly-repaired fridge - some relief, after being confronted by the possibility of an expensive replacement - I sat down with a clean sheet of paper to attack the problem once more. Another couple of hours or more left me fairly certain of the overall picture, with one unfortunate snag. There was one boy - a brother of my soldier - whose mother had died some fifteen months before his birth, and his father's next marriage wasn't until about eight years afterwards. It was at this point that realism took over. Many of these complexities were so distant from the family that I call mine - children of former husbands of later wives, and so on ...!
To apply an agricultural metaphor, the axe has been wielded, and the fence re-erected nearer home. I'm now left with a much smaller picture, but one which - however incomplete - I know to be relevant and, to the best of my knowledge, true.
Saturday, 24 September 2016
Friday, 16 September 2016
Long Ago and Far Away
Within the short time that has elapsed since I proudly announced, three weeks ago, the arrival from Dublin of a brightly coloured Irish marriage certificate, the world of genealogical research has taken a new and exciting turn. On Wednesday of last week, 7th September, Ireland's historic civil registers of births, marriages and deaths became available on line. The information that I paid €21 for only weeks ago is now available to print out at home free. And for the majority of these events an image of not just the entry sought, but the whole page on which it appears (that's 10 births or deaths or 4 marriages) can be downloaded ... also free. Scotland has offered this service to genealogists for many years, but in England and Wales the only option is the standard 'official certified copy' of a single register entry.
Imagine my great delight then when, earlier this week (after allowing the initial worldwide enthusiasm to die down), I took to the screen and - rather like a child let loose in a sweetshop - printed out register entries for every event I could remember (and one or two more that I discovered on the way). If I'd obtained this volume of detailed information about English relatives, the heap of paper I printed in about two hours the other evening would have cost me nearly £300!
Included in this collection were two particular marriage certificate images for daughters of my great-uncle. One of them I knew about already, but didn't have the full information. It was for a girl variously reported as Rosanne, Rose Anne or Roseana, who married a soldier in Limerick in 1904. At some point in the following years her husband was posted to England, and their first son was born near London. The family next surfaced at Kinsale near Cork, where the soldier died in the military hospital in September, 1909. Rose Anne was then pregnant with their second child, who was born in January, but died of bronchitis at the age of only eight weeks.
The other certificate was a much happier one. It was for her youngest sister, born in 1901, about whose marriage status I was quite convinced I would never learn until I should be able to visit the record office in Belfast. But there it was in black and white, Rebecca Evans married in Belfast on 17th February 1921. The records for the North available from this source end some time in 1921, when the six counties were separated following the Anglo-Irish Treaty, so I consider this find doubly lucky. It was perhaps a sign of the new modern age that, instead of a labourer or soldier, her husband was described as a 'cinema operator'.
So, for a Norfolk boy already thinking of his 'homeland' as Suffolk (my parents 'migrated' north in 1909 and 1926 respectively), this whole week has had a strangely Irish flavour as, first of all, I entered all these quasi-certificates into my records as 'valued documents', and then added all those extra details to that branch of my family tree. Two particular aspects of my great-uncle's story emerge. He went to Ireland in the first place as a soldier, having enlisted in the 27th Regiment of Foot at Norwich in 1871. He married a local girl and settled in Enniskillen, where they raised a family of seven daughters and four sons. The army had a continuing influence on the family. The 27th Regiment was one of the forerunners of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers; three of his sons and one son-in-law served with the Fusiliers, while four more sons-in-law served in other regiments.
It was interesting also, to note the various ways he described his 'rank or profession' at the births or marriages of his children. For the first five years, he was a 'Pensioner' or 'Military Pensioner'; then he appears for some years simply as a labourer. After this came a long period when he worked for the railway company and described himself variously as 'Porter', 'Railway Porter', 'Luggage Porter', or 'Railway Luggage Porter'. There followed more years as a labourer before in 1911 and 1914 he was a fisherman. The entry I liked best came on the marriage of his youngest daughter, where he proudly announced himself as 'Porter G.N.R.' (i.e. the Great Northern Railway, the importance of which was as the only railway company to cross the border with the Free State).
As I pondered this good fortune, memories of my father came to mind. Last week saw the thirtieth anniversary of his death and I realised - not for the first time - how little I know of his younger life. I have one photo of him in his schooldays, and one from teenage with his younger sister, and the next pictures show virtually the man I remember from my own early years, when he was courting my mother in his early 40s. In the light of these latest discoveries, I wonder just how much - if anything at all - he knew of his Irish cousins. Some of them were already married and living in England with their families by the time dad was going to school. When dad was meeting German prisoners-of-war in the farmyard (as I mentioned here a few weeks ago), two of his cousins had already died in the war.
Included in this collection were two particular marriage certificate images for daughters of my great-uncle. One of them I knew about already, but didn't have the full information. It was for a girl variously reported as Rosanne, Rose Anne or Roseana, who married a soldier in Limerick in 1904. At some point in the following years her husband was posted to England, and their first son was born near London. The family next surfaced at Kinsale near Cork, where the soldier died in the military hospital in September, 1909. Rose Anne was then pregnant with their second child, who was born in January, but died of bronchitis at the age of only eight weeks.
The other certificate was a much happier one. It was for her youngest sister, born in 1901, about whose marriage status I was quite convinced I would never learn until I should be able to visit the record office in Belfast. But there it was in black and white, Rebecca Evans married in Belfast on 17th February 1921. The records for the North available from this source end some time in 1921, when the six counties were separated following the Anglo-Irish Treaty, so I consider this find doubly lucky. It was perhaps a sign of the new modern age that, instead of a labourer or soldier, her husband was described as a 'cinema operator'.
So, for a Norfolk boy already thinking of his 'homeland' as Suffolk (my parents 'migrated' north in 1909 and 1926 respectively), this whole week has had a strangely Irish flavour as, first of all, I entered all these quasi-certificates into my records as 'valued documents', and then added all those extra details to that branch of my family tree. Two particular aspects of my great-uncle's story emerge. He went to Ireland in the first place as a soldier, having enlisted in the 27th Regiment of Foot at Norwich in 1871. He married a local girl and settled in Enniskillen, where they raised a family of seven daughters and four sons. The army had a continuing influence on the family. The 27th Regiment was one of the forerunners of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers; three of his sons and one son-in-law served with the Fusiliers, while four more sons-in-law served in other regiments.
It was interesting also, to note the various ways he described his 'rank or profession' at the births or marriages of his children. For the first five years, he was a 'Pensioner' or 'Military Pensioner'; then he appears for some years simply as a labourer. After this came a long period when he worked for the railway company and described himself variously as 'Porter', 'Railway Porter', 'Luggage Porter', or 'Railway Luggage Porter'. There followed more years as a labourer before in 1911 and 1914 he was a fisherman. The entry I liked best came on the marriage of his youngest daughter, where he proudly announced himself as 'Porter G.N.R.' (i.e. the Great Northern Railway, the importance of which was as the only railway company to cross the border with the Free State).
As I pondered this good fortune, memories of my father came to mind. Last week saw the thirtieth anniversary of his death and I realised - not for the first time - how little I know of his younger life. I have one photo of him in his schooldays, and one from teenage with his younger sister, and the next pictures show virtually the man I remember from my own early years, when he was courting my mother in his early 40s. In the light of these latest discoveries, I wonder just how much - if anything at all - he knew of his Irish cousins. Some of them were already married and living in England with their families by the time dad was going to school. When dad was meeting German prisoners-of-war in the farmyard (as I mentioned here a few weeks ago), two of his cousins had already died in the war.
Saturday, 10 September 2016
'Camel-Route-to-Iraq' Day
In case you're too young to understand my title, it comes from a Frank Sinatra song of the 1950s, in which 'Iraq' rhymes with the line, 'it's oh, so nice to wander back'. I'd booked four nights on a campsite near Boroughbridge, but when I began to plan what to do with my time there, I realised the truth that underlies the travel brochures' adverts for 'a 5-day break in ...'. What it really boils down to is a day to get there, three days' sightseeing and a day to come home. Yesterday was exhausting. I wanted to get my money's-worth and, by Thursday night, I was thinking that four nights deserved four days, too.
Having arrived on Monday at about 2.30, and got myself set up, I rejoiced that the new awning and windbreak could be set up without some of the feared problems of only having two hands (to do tasks several feet apart!), and set about relaxing and getting my on-site bearings. Sightseeing began on Tuesday after a leisurely breakfast. The 1A bus service from Roecliffe to Harrogate, which stops so conveniently outside the gate, unfortunately runs every two hours, with only four buses each way per day, so the first bus into town wasn't until 10.35. Study of the map revealed, however, that there was a stop just beyone Knaresborough perfectly situated to visit Old Mother Shipton's Cave. By 11.40, I'd paid my entrance fee and taken my first pictures of the 'scary exhibits'.
A typical mixture of myth and the supernatural, this tourist attraction, one of the oldest in the country, focuses on the life of a woman who, according to legend, was born in a cave in 1488 and grew up there with her mother. She was disfigured and shunned by the local population and later made all kinds of prophecies which appear to have been fulfilled down the years.
The next day, with temperatures soaring into the high 20s C., I walked early into Boroughbridge and thoroughly enjoyed wandering around, noting the history and taking pictures. Sited just off the motorway, the town's main street was once the main road from London to Edinburgh.
Being the half-way point between the two capitals, it was a favourite stopping point on that journey, and many of the coaching inns can still be seen, although some are now put to an alternative use. After lunch taken in the sunshine outside a café, I got the bus back to the campsite and spent the rest of the day sunbathing.
I'd planned another excursion on Thursday, and began the same way, walking into the town. I then joined a long queue for a 22 bus to Ripon. What a contrast between the small town I'd left and the 'city of the dales'. I admit my opinion was coloured by the drizzle that greeted me there; without the freedom to take out my leaflets and maps to see where exactly to go, I wandered around some of the nearby streets, and around the open air market before returning to the bus station to go back to base, where I could be constructive with my time. The afternoon was dry and quite pleasant but there was a noticeably strong wind at times, so I decided to take down the awning in readiness for my departure the next morning.
Yesterday, I combined the 'day to get home' with 'day 4 of the programme', making good use of the previous afternoon's preparations. I set off at 10.0, with a view to seeing something of the dales scenery before heading south. My planned destination was Pateley Bridge, but on the way found myself passing the ruins of the Cistercian Fountains Abbey.
I first went there some twenty-five years ago when taking part in a 'Medieval Monks & Monasteries' course at Durham University ... part of a wonderful scheme called Summer Academy, which folded some years ago now, owing to a change in people's holiday appetites. After such a delay, I had forgotten much of the detail, until it was revived by the good fortune of arriving just as one of the day's two guided tours was about to get under way.
I then went on to Pateley Bridge and took a few pictures there, but was restricted by the time-limted on-street parking. With something of the tourist aims thus fulfilled, I set off for the 180-or-so miles of the journey home, stopping for a very late lunch at Ferrybridge services and arriving home about 7.15pm.
I can now begin to evaluate the achievements of the week. On the plus-side, I happened upon a smart little camera in a charity shop, a little more modern than mine, which should only need a memory card and cable to get in operating order, and I was persuaded to take out a year's membership of the National Trust, which will hopefully provide an incentive to get out more to see some of the heritage that is being preserved for us all. The disappointment list is small, but is headed by the fact of the fridge in the motor-home not working, as I suspected on my last trip, when I found the milk was 'off'. The same happened this week, too, but I have been experimenting with cottage cheese!
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| The hitch-free set-up |
A typical mixture of myth and the supernatural, this tourist attraction, one of the oldest in the country, focuses on the life of a woman who, according to legend, was born in a cave in 1488 and grew up there with her mother. She was disfigured and shunned by the local population and later made all kinds of prophecies which appear to have been fulfilled down the years.
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| The 3 Horseshoes - one of over twenty coaching inns in Boroughbridge |
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| The Crown Hotel - in its heyday it had stabling for a hundred horses |
I'd planned another excursion on Thursday, and began the same way, walking into the town. I then joined a long queue for a 22 bus to Ripon. What a contrast between the small town I'd left and the 'city of the dales'. I admit my opinion was coloured by the drizzle that greeted me there; without the freedom to take out my leaflets and maps to see where exactly to go, I wandered around some of the nearby streets, and around the open air market before returning to the bus station to go back to base, where I could be constructive with my time. The afternoon was dry and quite pleasant but there was a noticeably strong wind at times, so I decided to take down the awning in readiness for my departure the next morning.
Yesterday, I combined the 'day to get home' with 'day 4 of the programme', making good use of the previous afternoon's preparations. I set off at 10.0, with a view to seeing something of the dales scenery before heading south. My planned destination was Pateley Bridge, but on the way found myself passing the ruins of the Cistercian Fountains Abbey.
 |
| Fountains Abbey |
I then went on to Pateley Bridge and took a few pictures there, but was restricted by the time-limted on-street parking. With something of the tourist aims thus fulfilled, I set off for the 180-or-so miles of the journey home, stopping for a very late lunch at Ferrybridge services and arriving home about 7.15pm.
I can now begin to evaluate the achievements of the week. On the plus-side, I happened upon a smart little camera in a charity shop, a little more modern than mine, which should only need a memory card and cable to get in operating order, and I was persuaded to take out a year's membership of the National Trust, which will hopefully provide an incentive to get out more to see some of the heritage that is being preserved for us all. The disappointment list is small, but is headed by the fact of the fridge in the motor-home not working, as I suspected on my last trip, when I found the milk was 'off'. The same happened this week, too, but I have been experimenting with cottage cheese!
Friday, 2 September 2016
All Change!
I've lost count of the number of times during the last thirty or so years that I've echoed the words attributed to Henry Ford, "If it ain't bust, don't fix it!" I certainly thought of them last Wenesday, as I mopped up what could only be side-effects of a two-hour Windows 10 update download the previous evening. It seems that - with all due respect to my American readers - modern America has lost touch with Henry's sentiments.
One of my spreadsheet applications has over fifty individual graphs with two vertical axes. Every one of them had been modified so that only one axis could be seen, and every one had to be individually corrected, by the same amount ... once I had searched all the menus to find out how to do it. That was no accident!
Furthermore, my favourite on-screen memo program, Sticky-notes, had also been changed. Not only had the font been changed from something cheerily informal to a bog-standard Tahoma or Arial, but the line-selector enabling a quick cut and shift of whole lines at a time had disappeared! When I explored a brand new menu icon and found settings for reporting my use of the product to ... who knows where? ... I realised that I'd found the explanation for an interminable wait for the effect of typing a single character to appear on the screen. It was time for it to go! I'm now using Evernote, which is also cloud-based, but seems to fulfil my needs with a sophistication, yes, that exceeds Sticky-notes, but at least isn't imperative.
Last week I reported delivering the awning that had been replaced by a fixed apparatus on my motorhome, and also an unexpected change-around of my lounge, two more recent changes that have been followed up. The weekend saw the departure of the redundant bookshelf, and on Tuesday I drove three boxes of books to a charity warehouse in the town, leaving only the lamp-stand to go. Three people were interested in this, but one after another dropped out of the running by neither appearing at the door to collect, nor responding to my e-mails. The result was a further minor adjustment to my reshuffle, and the lamp has now been re-instated beside the dining table.
On the bank holiday, I visited my cousin and spent a pleasant afternoon chatting in her garden and enjoying the sunshine ... a pleasure usually denied to flat-dwellers like me. During the course of my visit, she posed a question that I undertook to answer upon my return home. The next morning, therefore, I faced the challenge of finding the requisite books from my re-arranged shelves. To do this, I had to move a small storage cabinet, which I did without realising that on the top of it was an external hard-disk drive. As its power-lead tightened, this fell to the floor, shedding its case in the process. The case was fairly easily replaced, but upon testing, the drive was found not to work. Its use hadn't been essential, and its apparent demise has eliminated what was really an unnecessary daily task, so I'm not unduly worried.
More significant came the last change I want to mention. Yesterday, as I made to follow my usual habit of watching a catch-up TV programme over lunch using i-Player, I discovered the truth of a rumour I'd heard a week or so ago, that a change in regulations had now come into force, whereby watching such material, even long after it has been broadcast, now requires a TV licence. I have no intention of spending almost £150 in order to accompany two meals a day, so today I bought a newspaper, and sat at the dining table with this. By my reckoning, a paper will last two days (given my normal amount of available reading time), news the first day, features the second, and the total expenditure per annum should be less than half the cost of the TV licence! And, considering the intellectual content of the material, I shall be better-informed into the bargain!
But don't ask me to sell the car and walk everywhere, please. Even economy has its limits ... as yet!
One of my spreadsheet applications has over fifty individual graphs with two vertical axes. Every one of them had been modified so that only one axis could be seen, and every one had to be individually corrected, by the same amount ... once I had searched all the menus to find out how to do it. That was no accident!
Furthermore, my favourite on-screen memo program, Sticky-notes, had also been changed. Not only had the font been changed from something cheerily informal to a bog-standard Tahoma or Arial, but the line-selector enabling a quick cut and shift of whole lines at a time had disappeared! When I explored a brand new menu icon and found settings for reporting my use of the product to ... who knows where? ... I realised that I'd found the explanation for an interminable wait for the effect of typing a single character to appear on the screen. It was time for it to go! I'm now using Evernote, which is also cloud-based, but seems to fulfil my needs with a sophistication, yes, that exceeds Sticky-notes, but at least isn't imperative.
Last week I reported delivering the awning that had been replaced by a fixed apparatus on my motorhome, and also an unexpected change-around of my lounge, two more recent changes that have been followed up. The weekend saw the departure of the redundant bookshelf, and on Tuesday I drove three boxes of books to a charity warehouse in the town, leaving only the lamp-stand to go. Three people were interested in this, but one after another dropped out of the running by neither appearing at the door to collect, nor responding to my e-mails. The result was a further minor adjustment to my reshuffle, and the lamp has now been re-instated beside the dining table.
On the bank holiday, I visited my cousin and spent a pleasant afternoon chatting in her garden and enjoying the sunshine ... a pleasure usually denied to flat-dwellers like me. During the course of my visit, she posed a question that I undertook to answer upon my return home. The next morning, therefore, I faced the challenge of finding the requisite books from my re-arranged shelves. To do this, I had to move a small storage cabinet, which I did without realising that on the top of it was an external hard-disk drive. As its power-lead tightened, this fell to the floor, shedding its case in the process. The case was fairly easily replaced, but upon testing, the drive was found not to work. Its use hadn't been essential, and its apparent demise has eliminated what was really an unnecessary daily task, so I'm not unduly worried.
More significant came the last change I want to mention. Yesterday, as I made to follow my usual habit of watching a catch-up TV programme over lunch using i-Player, I discovered the truth of a rumour I'd heard a week or so ago, that a change in regulations had now come into force, whereby watching such material, even long after it has been broadcast, now requires a TV licence. I have no intention of spending almost £150 in order to accompany two meals a day, so today I bought a newspaper, and sat at the dining table with this. By my reckoning, a paper will last two days (given my normal amount of available reading time), news the first day, features the second, and the total expenditure per annum should be less than half the cost of the TV licence! And, considering the intellectual content of the material, I shall be better-informed into the bargain!
But don't ask me to sell the car and walk everywhere, please. Even economy has its limits ... as yet!
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