Roots, shoots and stories

 This topic is one I have posted about before - a photograph of my mum, dad and me  and also one of  my dad with his mum  . This year I'm choosing to post a slightly more up to date one - a photo of a professional photo taken of my own mum with my two children, shortly after the birth of my daughter. The photo itself hangs in my living room. My mum would have been 80 years old at the time. Although she had three other grandchildren by my sister, they lived down in England and she only saw them a couple of times a year, whereas she saw my children growing up from being babies, until she herself died some eight years later. In those eight years she had with them, she was a lovely gran to them. She would get down to their level on the floor with them and play whatever they wanted. She delighted in their company and even had them to stay overnight with her. They, in turn, gave her last years, which were healthy, real purpose. She just loved being 'Gran'.  When she w...

 When I first started researching my family tree it was early in the 1980s. My dad was still alive, so I remember asking him to tell me about his siblings and parents.  I knew he had been the youngest in the family. At that time, I also knew he had two living sisters, Agnes and Jean, two living brothers, Will and George and had a sister who had died, Mary (Polly). It was only then that he told me he had had other siblings - other six in fact, four of which he had never known, and two who had died as adults. My dad had never spoken about them to me before. Nor had he spoken to me about his parents - his dad had died many years before I was born and his mum had died when I was only three. So that was starting point, to fill in a family tree with any information I could find about those grandparents and my dad's siblings. Of course, it was much harder then than it is nowadays to find records. Firstly you had to physically go to the registry office - in my case, New Register House...