My routine has changed somewhat at the weekends as I now attend my local church for the 8.30am service, if only because there is the attraction of meeting fellow parishioners in the parish hall afterwards for tea and biscuits. This provides me with the opportunity of meeting with other age groups which I relish and afterwards, I go along and fill the car up with petrol, pick up a newspaper and then call in at my local supermarket where I can utilise their ATM machine as well as purchasing any last minute supplies. Then when I returned home, my son, daughter-in-law and myself started attacking the huge pile of family photographs we had released from some of the storage space in the house. In past decades, one took a roll of film along to a local chemist for development or even sent them away but we approached the task by throwing away any scenes of landscapes that we could not recognise or seem to have any significance for us. But any photos with family members featuring in them we tended to keep but labelling them up and then trying to add a date and, if possible, a location to help explain the context of the photo. Some of the photos detailed Meg and myself astride a summit on some Lake District mountain and my son himself features in many of them. I think that the earliest photo dates from the time that we introduced our son to fell by walking up Skiddaw (about the 3rd or 4th highest mountain in the area) but we ourselves were staying in a little family run hotel on the slopes of Skiddaw in any case. After we had a light lunch, we fell into talking about family history and we started to research some details of my family history on my grandmother’s side of the family. This proving to be quite problematic as we have so little to go on. But we have one or two fixed points and knowing that she died in 1960 aged 81 we can ascertain a birth date. I also have on my computer an image of the copy of the relevant entry made by my grandmother on the 1911 census but this is relatively little to go on. But my grandmother’s two Christian names were very common at the time as was her maiden name and we do not know some basic details such as the town I which she was living or even her marriage date or the first name of my maternal grandfather. My son and daughter-in-law have subscriptions to ancestry.com website to help them in their searches. To try and make sense of some of the very limited information that we have we are working on the theory that my grandmother may have been adopted at the age of 2 as we can find details of somebody with the same (but fairly common first name and surname) living with another family in the Hull area and this family may have had a child baptised at the same time as, eerily enough, both this family and my grandmother appear next to each other on the register of christenings suggesting that there was a ‘job lot’ of christenings and the families may have been entwined somehow. This task is like fitting together pieces of a huge jigsaw and it possible that we are making all kinds of false assumptions but we may all be wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The war in Iran is taking on some new and interesting dimensions. Trump has told the Iranians that if the Straits pf Hormuz are not reopened then the SA and Israel will attempt to wipe out Iranian power plants. By way of retaliation, the Iranians are saying that if Americans attack power plants, then Iran will do the same including the power plats of any of the allies. A certain amount of this is just posturing almost for the sake of it but it is always possible in these ‘tit-for-tat’ situations that one side or the other will make a bad miscalculation and the entire conflict spirals to a deeper and much more serious level. The week ahead is going to prove to a particularly interesting one as I have two new social activities in prospect. The most noteworthy one is a trip to the Jodrell Bank telescope where I am signed up for a trip and a tour of the facilities next Wednesday. This is a U3A trip and the coach picks me up from Bromsgrove Bus station just after 9.00am and then we are whisked up the M6 to the plains of Cheshire. In the afternoon we are going to tour the historic parts of Nantwich so it promises to be a great day out. The following day is going to be the initial meeting of the conversational Spanish group and we have been asked to say a little something about ourselves, including our hobbies and interests to get the ball rolling. What will be fascinating to learn is how good\/bad\/rusty all of us turn out to be. Those who have studied Spanish at school may well have a higher standard of grammatical accuracy to bring to the part whereas I shall just burble along in my self-taught kind of way. We are going to have a colder spell of weather in the next few days because the grass mowing season is upon us but this will have to wait until the end of the week. Of the various groups that I have joined, the one that has proved to be the most popular is the ‘Curry Club’ I think that this group already has well over 30 members and at least two thirds of them have already signed up for a meal in an excellent restaurant in the Droitwich area. As I have only recently signed up I have not managed to get into the party for the next eating occasion but at least I am in the system for the next time around. After I have experienced the various groups to which I have signed up, I will be able to make a decision as to which of these I shall continue with but in the meanwhile there is a house to maintain and a garden to get licked into shape. It is also my son’s birthday later in the week but I believe that his wife is taking him out for a special meal in Birmingham when I am out on my trip in any case. I have looked at the longer term weather forecast for the few days ahead and whilst the weather is going to be quite seasonably warm in the early part of the week, it will drift down towards the end of the week which is just when I wanted the weather to be fine for my gardening activities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My routine has changed somewhat at the weekends as I now attend my local church for the 8.30am service, if only because there is the attraction of meeting fellow parishioners in the parish hall afterwards for tea and biscuits. This provides me with the opportunity of meeting with other age groups which I relish and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8144,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8143\/revisions\/8144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}