“What’s Been Happening…?”
Posted by Jim Pedley on May 17, 2009
I’m back. .. I have just risen to the surface of a maelstrom of names and dates and statistics that have been whirling and swirling me around on a giddying roundabout of history-chasing in the effort to find out who I am, and where I came from – literally!
For the last few weeks, I’ve been caught up in the quite recently popular hobby of Family History, whereby you decide that you’ll have a go at finding out whether – down the line – you may be the result of high-born, aristocratic capers with the pretty, bosomy, pantry maid – or a murderous thug’s rape of some poor lady of wealth whose mansion he has just burgled…
It all started with a letter from a lady asking me if I was related to the family of the Charles Pedley who - as a result of a house fire in January 1927 – suffered the appallingly tragic loss of a wife, six children, and a young friend of the family who was staying overnight. The only survivor apart from the father, Charles, was Thomas, who was eight years of age. The story hugged national and local headlines for some days as the coroner probed the circumstances.
Although very ill in hospital, Thomas survived and finally lived to an advanced age.
Charles was my grandfather’s brother, my Dad’s uncle, and Thomas - of course - was my Dad’s cousin…
It turns out that the lady who wrote the letter – Joyce Smith (Smith, would you believe!) was a relative - her grandfather being my grandfather’s brother and also the brother of Charles, who suffered the loss of his family in the 1927 fire. Joyce has been investigating her family history for some time, which is why she had written to me – having been going through the local ‘phone book and writing to every Pedley listed looking for information.
Well, my family have never been very “close” – as they say – and when I was growing up, what with the 1920/30’s Depression, and then the WW2 follow-up, family chats about one thing or another didn’t exist, and information about family members was at a premium.
When I answered Joyce’s letter I discovered that apart from his brother Charles, who we knew about for obvious reasons, grandad William had six other siblings who – not even my surving Aunt Florrie, grandad’s daughter, knew about! And she’s 85 this year.
I’m afraid that did it! There was no way I could leave the situation as it stood – especially having acquired another cousin of one kind or another, in the person of the letter-writer, Joyce Smith! Let’s work it out. Joyce’s mother and my dad were cousins. So I guess that makes Joyce and me third cousins. Does it? I’d be glad if someone would work it out for me!
It’s just part of the maelstrom I told you I’d dived into a few weeks back. And at eighty years of age, myself, you might say that the undertaking of such a new exercise as the chasing up of one’s ancestry is asking a bit much of a brain that – at my age – is supposed to be losing cells left, right, and centre!
But I’ve been making headway, and I have come across relatives I haven’t been in contact with for 60 or 70 years or so, including the acquisition of further new cousins. And I have discovered great-grandfathers, several times removed, who are still, somehow or other, avoiding the clearing up of little mysteries that, maybe, should be left hovering in the mists of time…
But whatever new statistic I come across I seem to have to grope deeper and deeper, as various dates and marriages don’t seem to gel from time to time, and in comes the frustration that sends me to bed with my head whirling. It’s a good thing I’m on 24-hour oxygen.
Nevertheless, there is no way I can now leave this so fascinating subject alone – not at this stage, anyway, when I am starting to unravel (but oh so slowly!) some of the deep, dark secrets that have come floating to the top of my ancestry…
Catch you later.
