i wish bluewater was closer to home!

i met nan at bluewater shopping centre today. i drove down with no problems, i left at 9am, stopped for petrol and was there by 9.45am! nan's coach didn't get in until 10.45am, so i stopped at Asda then drove onto Bluewater. i was inside bluewater by 10.15am.

nan was held up a bit by the major road works around the A2 junction but was only about 10 mins behind the scheduled time of arrival.

anyway we did a lap of the ground floor, went to John Lewis "The Place to Eat" for lunch (coped fine with a feta, olive and pepper salad with balsamic syrup and a fruit salad after) then did a lap of the upper mall finishing with a drink at a cafe before nan's coach arrived ready to go home at 4pm.

we got to john lewis restaurant early fo a drink and had a look at the family history bits i had found on her father's line of the family. nan had also spoken to her brother to compare what the remembered. Uncle arthur recalls his father being one of 9 children, 3 of whom died very young, and their parents' (so nan's paternal grandparents) died before nan was born. she had the name of the 6 who lived past childhood, and i was able to match them up to the census records i had found for 1901, 1891, 1881 and 1871. from those census records i could them tell nan the names of 2 of the siblings who didn't make it past childhood. i only have rough estimates of years of birth at the moment and i haven't found the name or birth of the 3 child who died young, although nan and uncle arthur have been led to believe that their father (who was the youngest of the nine) was named after the other child who died young.

so these are the rough birth dates i have so far:

Ellen (who called herself Nell, but was down as Susan E on one census) - 1877
William - 1880
Edith - 1881 - died young, before the 1891 census
ernest - 1883
henry (known as harry by nan) - 1890
thomas - 1891 - died young before the 1901 census
mabel - 1893
arthur - 1896

looking at the dates again there is a large gap in time between ernest and henry, so maybe i'll look at births in those years for the surname, plus i know that by the 1881 census they were living in southwark in london and had left plymouth in devon. as ellen was born in plymouth but william was born in southwark as were the rest of the children.

i was also able to tell nan that her grandfather and grandmother on the paternal side were named william H, born c.1854 and Susan E, born c.1855. i have also found william H as a child in the 1851 census in devon but his father was already dead as it shows his mother as a widow aged 44.

phew. so that was my lovel day at bluewater but as soon as i drove out of the carpark i hit solid traffic. it then took me 2 hours to drive the normally 10 minute route to get to the Dartford tunnel. according to 106.2 Heart FM they had closed it down to 1 lane at junction 30 the other side of the tunnel because they were doing "emergency repairs", but it caused 12 miles of queues. nan's coach drive told them that the road was erroding and subsiding which was what the emergency repairs were! once the radio said they had reoppened the road you could tell the difference and it was just a case of clearing the backlog through the tunnel which then moved within about 20 minutes.

the other side of the tunnel it was clear. so i decided to make a quick pit stop at Thurrock services, called mum and asked her to sort my dinner (yes i actually trusted someone else to prepare my food for a second time in one day!) and said i'd be 30 minutes. she reckoned more like an hour.

i was home in 35 minutes and very glad to be home too!

have said all that i wouldn't have missed my day with nan for the world. my 5 hours with her was certainly worth the hour travel there and the 3 hours journey home! and because of that i actaully don't feel stressed by the bad end to the day.

but now i really must get some sleep.

A Mystery Solved!

from my research i noticed that my grandfather's grandfather died reasonably young, aged 34, in 1911. by this time his children were only about 5 or 6 (i can't remember without looking it up). but on the phone tonight nan mentioned that she remembered that grandpa's grandfather had died falling off a roof at the bottom of West Street in Brighton.

this then rang bells of someone dying early and when i checked who it was all the details slotted into place! Another mystery solved!

A Great Genealogy Resource

Mum asked a collegue at work about their family history research, as she knew that the lady and her husband had done quite a lot already.

The husband passed on a list of useful websites and this morning i've started working my way through them.

i've started with this one:

http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/

it contains scanner images of the birth, marriage and death indexes.

a great resource thats seem to be working well so far. their search system seems to be bringing up most of my names, but even if it doesn't you can look through the whole index if you know the year and quarter - the only problem is you have to work out what page number it is on!

Family Tree

Yesterday Mum and I went to Epping Library to have a half hour taster session on Ancestry.com. The website contains details or Census records, birth, marriage and death records, military records etc. however although you can see the basic name and details on the website you can't see any further details without paying a fee. for an annual subscription the fee is £80.

on her lunch time walk, when returning some maps to the library on day mum spotted a leaflet about this family history taster session and convinced me to phone and book one of the half hour slots, and i'm so glad she did!

it turns out that Essex county council has somehow got free access to the website and all the detailed information on it including images of the records at every Essex Library.

as the man was showing us how the website worked and what it had to offer, we used some of the details that i have from a family tree that a solicitor in sussex did for Grandpa a few years back. We entered the name of Grandpa's grandfather and found him! we were able to tell it was him as all the brothers and sisters listed matched those listed on my family tree, with a few extra added on! so now i have birth years for them and also know the name's and birth year's of their parents - which is grandpa's great grandparents!

mum and i were getting so excited when a woman from the library came over to tell the man that our half our was almost up. frustrating i know, but such a boost and kick start. he also gave us tips of drawing a family tree, one being; use a roll of wallpaper, as it's big and easy to transport. which is what i didn when i came home. i also went back to the ancestry website to see what information i could access from home. it is only basic names and years but i was able to find some years of deaths which also provided a couple of middle names. for example on the details i already had there was a Queenie A L Taylor. i put those details into the deaths search narrowing my search to england. i didn't even need to narrow it to sussex as in the list there was only one person of that name listed with those initials and that person died in sussex, which is where the person on my tree was last listed as living. on the website she was listed as Queenie Agnes L Taylor - so now i have a middle name for her as well!

i have nothing to do today, apart from maybe try and take some more photos for my christmas cards (as only 3 out of the dozen or so that i've tried look any good) so i can spend all day with the family tree finding out as many basic names and birth years as i can so that when i go to an essex library i have something to work from.

i can't wait to get going, i just hope my enthusiam and motivation for this can last.