Thursday, February 22, 2007

A twig on my family tree

My Uncle Eric, my Dad's brother, has been working on our family tree for years now. He has been very successful and has traced the line back to the 16th century, although there are some missing parts and some unclear parts. I'm very proud of his achievements.

Some interesting coincidences have been unearthed in his research. Dad's family centre around Liverpool and we ended up on the North East Coast after Dad had travelled around the world, met Mum and settled (by an accident of his posting)near her family's home. I work in Hartlepool, 15 miles away from home, and lived there for a number of years. Anyway, it turns out that Dad's family - my great, great grandfather - had a bell hangers and whitesmiths business in Hartlepool, with some of his children being born in Hartlepool - on a peninsula area called The Headland. Now I know there are still Stewarts on the Headland as I used to work with some and I know that a 6 year old boy from the Stewart family was killed in the 1914 bombardment of Hartlepool by the German navy. (Hartlepool was the first place on mainland Britain to be bombed by the Germans in WW1)I need to do some research of my own to chase up these leads.

In the meantime, Eric has dug out some photos of VE Day in Liverpool.



Seeing my family hanging an effigy that is supposed to be Adolf Hitler was quite disturbing on first sight, but I guess you have to filter it through the experience and context of the time.



J's Dad is 80 this year, which makes me think we should probably get some of J's family tree down on paper too.

2 comments:

Schlarg said...

Can you knit a cover for a jar of peanut butter?

blog-blethers said...

Isn't it amazing how sometimes our families seem to turn full circle over the generations? My gran was born in 1902 in Northern Ireland and moved to live with an aunt in Glasgow, helping in the aunt's shop in 1920. Although I grew up in the west coast of Scotland in a fairly rural, I went to uni in Glasgow. My granny never got over her surprise that 2 generations later, I bought a tenement flat about 100 yards from where that shop had been!!