I just went to my first local genealogy group meeting, and I loved it. There was a variety of experience, age, and history in the room – which is fascinating. I talked a bit about my two big brick walls, losing my entire database in a hard drive crash, and my murderous coal mining ancestors.
I’ll be going back next month, for sure. 🙂
I am back.
I took a few years off from this blog, for reasons that I cannot recall right now, but I am glad to be back. I certainly haven’t stopped working on my genealogy, and in fact, my tree has grown substantially. Last year, I got married, and so I’ve had a whole other branch to look into.
I’ll be updating my Brick Walls and About pages pretty soon. But in the meantime, hello again! 🙂
Boy, this “writing and publishing a book” thing sure takes up a lot of time. I’ve completely stalled in my genealogy research, because I’m spending so much time researching social history.
I am giving myself another day or two, and then digging back into my family history. I miss it!
Well, sorta.
My cat, Bitsy, is rather sick. She’s been diagnosed with megacolon, and is currently in hospital having unspeakable things done to her insides. I am worried, and when I worry, I need something to do. Laundry is on, dishwasher running, house is relatively tidy.. what now?
Now, I am working on my book. I am writing one, you see, like many other people out there. For the longest time, I’ve been throwing around ideas, doing half-hearted outlines, and have been totally unable (or unwilling) to get anywhere with it. Until this month, when I decided to narrow the focus.
I narrowed the focus down to tracing my family through the 1800s. That nicely fits in with 4 generations of my family, from my great-grandparents, to my 4th great grandparents. I’m going backwards from each great grandparent, which gives me 120 people total. Scratch that, 150 — I’m going to also do my step-father’s tree, because he raised me and it seems silly not to add his family into the mix.
And so, for each of these 150 people, I am going to get my hands on original records, if I can, for all their major life events, and do research on what their careers would have been like, and their daily lives, and the places they lived. Should take me, oh, 10 years?
And then I want to write a story, not just present facts. I want to dig through weather reports and see if I can find out if it was sunny or not on my 3rd great grandmother’s wedding day. And find out who my 2nd great grandfather may have worked with in the coal mines in Stirlingshire. Et cetera, et cetera.
Oh, but isn’t it going to be fun! 🙂
24 May 1879
Fatal Pit Explosion – A disastrous explosion occurred on Sat afternoon at Denny in the No 1 pit, Quarter, Denny, belonging to Messrs Baird of Gartsherrie, which resulted in the death of one man and the serious injury of another. Robert Henderson, fireman, residing in Dunipace, was killed by the explosion, and Robert Cook, a roadsman residing in Denny, severely burned, but Dr Benny who attended him, reported on Sunday that he was doing pretty well. Henderson was 26 years of age and leaves a widow and 3 children. [Hamilton Advertiser May 31 1879]
— from The Scottish Mining Website, Stirlingshire Accidents 1871-1901
Robert Henderson was my 2nd great grand uncle. I found this sad little entry entry quite by accident – I was looking for information on the coal pits in the Denny area, and noticed a death by a man with the surname Henderson. I immediately hopped over to ScotlandsPeople to pull his death record up, and sure enough, he is related to me. My 2nd great grandfather, William Henderson, was the informant for his death record.
I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to live in that place and time, to be a coal miner, or the spouse of a coal miner. I read through a few of the other entries as well, and it just seems too horrible to contemplate. By the way, the 2nd man listed in the quote above did end up dying of his injuries. RIP, Robert Henderson, and RIP, Robert Cook.
And on that note, I am off to bed, hopefully not to dream of pit explosions.
This week, in my family, a birth, a marriage, and a death:
Actually, I’d like to talk about 2 births this week, the first one being near and dear to me:
April 10, 1930 – My maternal grandmother was born, in Rochdale, Lancashire. I’d go into a lot more detail, but she’s still living. She’s the stunning woman in the foreground of the header image on my website. Happy birthday, Grandma! 🙂
April 13, 1908 – Helena Jennie “Dodie” Crassweller, my great grand aunt, was born in Gloucester, Gloucestershire. She died on September 2, 1970, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, of brain cancer. She was married twice, but I don’t know when or where her marriages took place, but I believe she married her 2nd husband after the death of her first husband, Frank Wilfred Brooker, who was a Vancouver fire fighter who died in 1964. I found Helena’s gravestone on a recent trip to Ocean View Cemetery in Burnaby, British Columia – she’s buried next to her mother, Amelia Esther Rudge.
April 11, 1721 – My 7th great grandparents, Joseph King and Mary Bateman, were married in Tingewick, Buckinghamshire. Tingewick is a small place, and my family lived there for many generations. I’ve no idea what Joseph did for a living, but I do know that he died on September 6, 1766, and had at least one child. Mary was baptised on May 2, 1689, and was buried on May 16, 1762.
April 13, 1819 – My 4th great grandparents, Bartholomew Parker and Tryphosa Southcombe, were married in Hatherleigh, Devon. I absolutely love their names. He was a farmer, born in 1793 in Iddesleigh, Devon, to unknown parents. I don’t know when he died, yet, but I’ll find out! Tryphosa was born in 1798, in Hatherleigh, and I don’t know when she died, either. They had a pretty remarkable number of children – 10 in total, most of whom I know very little about, except my 3rd great grandfather, John Parker.
April 9, 1916 – My great grandmother’s first husband, Cpl. John Arthur Cross, was killed in action in World War I in Nahr Kalis, Mesopotamia, an area just south of modern-day Baghdad, Iraq. He joined the military on September 13, 1914, less than 3 years after he married my great grandmother. He served with the 6th Battalion of the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment. My grandmother believes that one of her uncles with was him when he died – I like to think that this is true, even though I haven’t dug into my great uncle’s military records yet to see if he was even in the same place at the same time. I do, however, have Cpl. Cross’ military records, and I love to read them, with their burnt edges and letters written by my great grandmother to the War Office, asking about her husband’s missing in action status.
I went out today to buy some groceries, and got sucked into a little used book store down the road from my house. I try to limit my trips in there, but they have such a great collection that it’s hard to avoid. Every time I go, I find a few gems for my genealogy/history collection. Today was no different. From left to right:
These books all relate directly to someone or some place in my family history, with the exception of the Anne Langton book – I bought that one just because I love the idea of reading about what it was like for the settlers of Upper Canada, even though my family didn’t make it over here until the early 1900s. I’m looking forward especially to the book on Canadian housewives – it covers the 1600s to 1950s!
What have you found in your local used or new book store lately concerning your family history? Anything good? Please share!
Current recommended reading:
Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women, edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies (link takes you to the Amazon.com page for the book)
This book is a gem. I’ve just finished reading it, and am very glad I picked it up on a whim from the history section of my local Chapters store. It is a series of essays, written by working-class women, giving an account of daily life in the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s in Britain. These women were agricultural labourers, clerks, hat makers, wives of coal miners, mothers, domestic servants, nurses, midwives, and more. And all of them have an important story to tell.
There is something to be said for understanding the context of what it is that we are recording when we do genealogical research. It’s not enough, for me, to know that my 4th great grandfather was a coal miner who died young and had a pile of children. What was his life like? What was his wife’s life like? And his children?
This book gave me a small window into the daily lives of coal miners at the turn of the century, and now I feel just a tiny bit closer to understanding where it is that I came from.
Next book on my list, although I’m not that far back in my tree (yet), is The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer. I’m only halfway through the first chapter, so I can’t say how useful and entertaining it is yet, but so far so good!
This has happened to me once before. Last year, I made a big trip to my grandmother’s house and interviewed her. I recorded 3 hours of audio, and scanned dozens of photographs and documents. I fleshed out several branches of descendants for her siblings. It was exciting, and amazing, and when I got home, I just couldn’t face all the work, so I said I’d look at it tomorrow. Tomorrow turned into several weeks.
The same thing is happening to me now – I keep opening the folder from my trip, with all its wonderful photos and documents and notes about kinship, and then I close it again, thinking I’ll do it later.
I don’t want to take a month off!
And so, I have decided to tackle one thing a day, and then move on to a problem on another branch of my tree. Hopefully that will keep my head in the game.
And so, without further ado: the wedding photograph of my maternal grandparents, James Brian Mitchell (1925-2012) and Margaret Rickson (living). This photograph was taken on March 8, 1952, at St. Peter’s in Rochdale, Lancashire, England. I also have copies of their more formal wedding photograph, with their attendants, but I like this one best – their faces say it all!
I’ve just arrived home from a trip to visit my family for Easter. We had a nice potluck dinner on Saturday, and we got to visit and catch up, which doesn’t happen all that often because we’re so spread apart geographically.
I got a lot of genealogical work done this weekend, as well. My sister and I visited the cemetery near where we grew up, and I found the gravestones of two sets of my great grandparents, as well as a few other collateral relations.
On Sunday, I spent the day with my grandmother, going through boxes (and boxes and boxes) of photographs and old documents, and found a few real gems – photographs of people who I’d never seen before, and the immigration cards for my grandparents and my great uncle and aunt and their son. I spent 7 hours scanning it all, and now I have the great task of sorting through it and adding documents and photographs to Family Tree Maker.
Spring has sprung here in Vancouver, so I’m going to work on some of it from my local Starbucks patio, and then I’m going to get myself out into the sunshine, so this may take a while. I also have homework due for my course on Scottish genealogy, so there’s another delay.
But, for now, here’s one of the photographs I managed to find – of my great uncles and great aunt:
Charlie Rickson (1923-2005), Tom Rickson (1921-2010), and Emily Rickson (1920-2005).
Midnight Genealogy 