Friday 11 January 2008

Thursday and Friday............

And very little change in anything. The weather is still making everything miserable, cold, wet and very grey. A little blue sky, with a few of those white fluffy things, would make all the difference.

Thursday was a shopping day, but with very little on my list, I was out and back in about 45 minutes.

As for today, I've done nothing other than answer a few outstanding letters from Christmas and the New Year. Doesn't that seem a long time ago now? We did have a welcome surprise in the post today. A letter from a distant relation. Distant, because she lives near Brisbane, and distant because she is a descendant of my great great grandfather's brother. I'll leave you to work it out!

Betty, and a cousin came over to the U.K in the early 1980's, armed with notes collected from another cousin's visit a few years earlier. They scoured the Family History Records Office and traveled where ever a lead took them. They contacted all people they found with the family name, then met and talked to all that they could. With the information gathered, they returned home and wrote a book, The Pride of Christies Row.

The book is about the family and it's development in Australia, from it's roots in 18th century Devon, to the present day. It's an excellent starting point for anyone in our family wanting to find out about where we came from. It suffers from some inaccuracy, passed down family knowledge not being quite the truth, but that's part of it's charm.

I've always kept in touch with Betty because there was only a brief mention to my family line in the book. My grandfather was listed, then the christian name of his eldest son after that. I've been able to add to that line, trace other lines, and to correct some of the untruths. There are still a few people missing, names without faces, but thats the same with most family trees and why we keep searching.

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