The Picture On The Wall

Ancestry

I had a pleasant surprise not too long ago. It was an email basically, from someone I didn’t know. It turned out though, that through a series of circumstances, I find I am now a relative of this lady. My brother had some kids, two boys and a girl. They are long ago grown up to be adults, and my brother is now deceased. It seems that one of his boys met a girl and they had a child between them, a girl. The email was from the girls mother and she asked me if I could help her out with some information. She is trying to put one of these ancestry records together to give to her daughter, that way she will always have a keepsake of her roots. Seeing as I am the last surviving member of my immediate family, I would be her only direct living source of help.

It is amazing really what turns up once you get started into something like that. With the documentation that I was able to come up with along with Julie. We have put together information going as far back as six generations. The very thought of that blows me away, on top of that I had photographs of most all of them so far. Thanks to Julie, there is a whole new aspect of my life that I had overlooked until she opened that door.

Of course what seems so ironical is, I have been writing about a lot of family things in my blog. I have a large picture of my biological father, grandfather and grandmother. Of course also pictures of my mother and other members of my family and some kids. That’s quite a pot of Irish stew! Even though we’re not Irish, at least at this point it would be closer to Welsh.

With the picture of my Father, there is a story attached to that. My dad died when I was a baby of two, and my mother never remarried until I was ten. I had never seen a picture of my father before not ever! In 1969 my step-father died, so I flew home for his funeral. Whenever I went to England I always made it a 3 week trip or else it wasn’t worth the expense of going from here. My mother called me into the sitting room before I left to come back here. She had something to show me that she had kept hidden all my life. It was the picture of my biological father hidden behind another picture, it had been hanging on that wall all those years! I was almost 37 yrs old at that time and she had never said a word about it. Now with the advent of her death, I have that picture today. Pretty strange no matter how you want to look at it. Even after all these years I am still amazed.

Tea time!

C’ya