Instant Cousins : archiving my ancestry
- Cheesemongers and Dairies
- House History
- Other Stories
- Reviews, Reports and Research
- Stone, Steam and Dynamite
- The Welsh Connection
- Wheelwrights, Publicans and a Country Lad
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A Will and a Codicil
This week’s post is based on one piece of research that I am using that triangulates other stories from the National Archives. When my cousin Elsa died at the beginning of the Covid lockdowns, a funeral that I would not have missed under other circumstances, she also left some papers and photos that her brother…
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Nye Bevan knew my Uncles
This week my post is about an intriguing historical photograph of a group of men taken in or around 1922. They are formally dressed in suits, some in dinner suits. Seated and standing for a photographer to record them. They look serious, thoughtful and with meaningful intent. The Query Club, Tredegar, about 1922. Nye Bevan…
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Life begins at Number 7
The Scotts’ moved in to 7 Earlspark Avenue in April 1910. That was just over 114 years ago. In 1987 I moved into 7 Earlspark Avenue with my wife and son. That was 37 years ago. The Scotts’ lived here for 45 years. We moved in 32 years later. I have a fascination with the…
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Bill Carver
George William Eustace Henry Carver was my father. He always signed his name G.H. Carver, but everyone called him Bill. Unless my mother was admonishing him for something and then she called him William. Baptism entry in the Oxted Parish Church register for W.G.E.H Carver, Bill Carver, living in School Lane, his father was a…
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Grace, before marriage.
This week I am concentrating on The 1911 Census return for a house in Acton, London. In 1911, Grace Walker, my grandmother, before she married William Wilcox, had moved to London from Offord D’Arcy in Huntingdonshire, to lives with a cousin. The address is 39, Mill Hill Road, Acton. It is a large house, three…
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Whithorn, a field trip journal
We have just returned from the Whithorn peninsula. The cone shaped peninsula that juts out from Galloway into the entrance of the Solway Firth. With gentle rolling hills and moors known as the Machars, grazed by the distinctive black with white strip Galloway cows, this hidden area of Scotland is steeped in history. The first…
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First Residents
I am writing this post in the smallest of the upstairs rooms. In all there are five rooms in the house plus a kitchen and bathroom. The kitchen was once the scullery, and it was built with a concrete floor with a gradient leading to a drain. This enabled any overflow of water from the…
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The Cheesemongers of Bermondsey
My Great Great Grandfather Samuel Walker could, I suppose be called a Bermondsey Boy. Born and brought up there, married in St. Mary’s Church, Rotherhithe. He was ticking some boxes there. He was not a Bermondsey Boy in the traditional sense. That sense would have its roots in the nostalgia of the 20th Century like…