First Steps

Sunday night we received an email from Julie in England, yes the one who is doing so much in the ancestry search thing. It seems that on Monday morning, her daughter was graduating from the Lancaster University in England, and the ceremony was going to be live on the internet! Well it meant being out of bed before 5am (for England is 5 hours ahead of our time) so we could watch, but how could we not watch! We wouldn’t miss that for the world.

Talk about a beautiful ceremony, you just have to love all the pomp & pageantry and the different colorful gowns of the principal teaching staff and of course the gowns & mortar boards of the students. From time to time the camera would pan the audience of families and friends. You could see the look of excitement and expectations on their faces. It was so wonderful to watch the students of differing ages and different cultures and even one in a wheelchair, as they went up and were greeted by the Dean of the University to receive their diploma, a warm handshake, and a congratulatory word. The whole ceremony was heralded with the sound of trumpets, making it all so much more spectacular. ~ So very special.

It is nice to visualize that this young woman has her whole life ahead of her. Now accompanying her on such an exciting start, the results of the first step, on her journey into a future of who knows where! We all wish her well.

C’ya

A Visit to my Father’s Grave

The yellow haze hung in the air like an impending disaster. Above the haze even larger volumes of stormy clouds swirled around tenaciously. Slowly at first the drizzle came down, the kind they call Scotch mist. It saturates the clothing in a very short time and leaves you standing there freezing to the bone. From the edges of the undergrowth rose a cold damp mist that enshrouds and clings to everything. Visibility was at a minimum, making one feel like they were trapped inside a bottle or a drain like a drowned rat.

Slowly out of the murky depths emerged a figure, a small slight woman, holding the hand of a child. Hunched over against the cold and wet breeze she peered looking for something. Gradually, slowly, like ghostly apparitions, headstones emerged from the mist. Still my mother and I moved on seeking now we can presume, a particular grave. ~ I was four years old.

That is all I can remember about that visit other than eventually we arrived at a headstone. Then we just stood there in the cold misty rain, and my mother added a warming tear or two. That was the only visit I ever made to what I found out years later, was my fathers grave. Came the war, evacuation and I just forgot the road back.

All of this I have to say, has been brought about pure and simply because Julie contacted me, about tracing my families ancestry for her daughter.

One wonders in this exciting adventure, about the long and winding road.

To you Julie, I am forever indebted for this trip.

C’ya

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