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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Uncle Sydney serves his country
The following picture shows my Great Uncle Sydney in the garden of my Aunt Dorothy’s house in Palmers Green. He is standing behind my cousins. I have been trying to work out the year this was taken. I am the same age as one of my cousins and judging by looks I am suggesting that…
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Grace, in her own write
My Mother, Grace Carver (William Wilcox’s eldest daughter), often talked of the number of places and houses that she lived. I think she once told me that she lived in 26 different addresses. That would be with her parents and in married life. I can certainly make a claim to six of those addresses. This…
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Great Aunt Ethel
Ethel Maude Mary Wilcox was born in July 1873 – 150 years ago. She was the first born of John and Lena Wilcox, my Great Grandparents. Aunt Ethel was my Great Aunt. I never met her but my cousin Sue remembers that she occasionally visited and stayed in her parents house in Palmers Green. One…
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The Oxted Bike Shop
It’s back to the Spilletts this week. I remember a talking heads video that my sister Janet made of my Father, Bill Carver. He was talking about his childhood. I remember him talking about his two uncles who ran a bicycle shop in the High Street, Oxted, the village where my father was born. Old…
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What’s in a name ?
In August I related the story of my Wife’s Great Uncle Alexander who was a Gardener by trade all of his life. I have also described the background history to her Great Aunt Louisa who became a Domestic Servant in Bournemouth before marrying the licensee of a pub in Irvine, Ayrshire. I have also described…
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Francis (nee Wilcox)
This week I describe some of the details of the records that I know of and have found regarding the three Wilcox siblings who left London for Wales. Two of them left under circumstances that cannot be proved and there is only one anecdotal story relating to it. The third joined them after her parents…
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Aberdeenshire to Ayrshire
After writing my short account of the book Akenfield last week it got me thinking about the occupations of many of my and my wife’s ancestors. Agricultural Labourer was a common occupation listed against many of our family members in the early Census returns. Whether it was in Sussex, Surrey, Wigtownshire and Aberdeenshire, working on…
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Akenfield
I have been reading this book after I read the author’s obituary earlier in the year. Ronald Blythe lived in Suffolk and created this oral history of the village that he lived close to. He kept the name of the village anonymous and the name Akenfield is invented from possibly two other village names. He…
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Searching for Aunt Mabel
A short posting this week about a Great Aunt who if I met I cannot remember because I would have been very young. My Father, Bill Carver, had two aunts on his Mother’s side. It was Mabel’s absence in the 1901 Census return when the Spillett’s came to Oxted that led me on a short…
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Every Picture Tells A Story…………..
Or does it ? Most pictures from the past will raise questions that can be very difficult to answer. For instance, if I was to explain that the picture above of my Great Grandfather and his six sons has no women in it, yet there were a further six siblings, five girls and another boy,…