Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Family history is something of an on and off hobby for me as it can sometimes be several years before more information becomes available.

In between times, it’s often worthwhile looking again at the information already to hand as there are often hidden gems amongst it. For example, the original family bible from William Stewart who was born way back on June 28th 1835 though it probably dates from September 6th 1858 when he married Eliza Dalrymple. He kept that up to date throughout his life as did his children although there are gaps both in later and earlier generations.

Those gaps can largely be filled in though. One very simple thing was realising that there was a very consistent habit of naming the first born boy and girl after the father and mother. Thus, when the “first” born wasn’t that meant that there was either a stillborn child or, more likely (because stillborn children didn’t get named), a child who died quite young. That such children existed has been confirmed in all cases where I’ve had later information about the family so, for example, the 1911 census confirmed several of these children in various branches of the family.

Other bits of information can sometimes need more thought. It was puzzling as to why David J Tannihill of Market Square Lisburn paid for the grave of my great grandfather Andrew. However, later on I found that when he died he was living in 155 Mayo Street, Belfast so if his family had bought the grave they’d have had to pay the non-resident rate for the grave. Who David Tannihill was remains, for the moment, a mystery as indeed does the reason why he wasn’t buried in Belfast instead.

I’ve suspected for a while that some of the location information I have for various people isn’t quite right as we tried to get some birth and marriage certificates where they were recorded as living at the time but found that the information just wasn’t there. So, the plan was to get the certificates from known locations and work backwards from there. That was a problem though as I didn’t know for sure where my grandfather was born. Or, rather, I didn’t realise that I really did know. That information came from his older sister Mary who died when she was 2 in Killymackel, Derriaghy (near Lisburn) of bronchitis. Thus I know that the family lived there in 1896 but in Mayo Street by 1906.

Interestingly, Derriaghy is where my Dad continued to go to the Masonic Lodge so presumably they would have some information about everyone from him back to my great grandfather and perhaps even the generation before that. Also, some years back I went round the nearby Presbyterian churchyard which seemed to have a number of Stewarts buried although at the time I hadn’t linked that with my lot (another visit is called for to recheck that information).

Finally, there’s my latest flash of inspiration. Whilst I’ve known for a while that my grandfather was in the first world war and that there should therefore be a service record for him, what didn’t occur to me is that there would be a corresponding service record from his time in the police so that’s something else to look into.

Saturdays seem to be getting busier and busier for us as it seems like every activity you want to do ends up being scheduled for some time on a Saturday. Thus, we found ourselves on the go pretty much non-stop from about 9.30 through to almost 6pm today.

For the usual reasons (ie religion), Sunday never gets even half so busy as even the least busy Saturday. Whilst may deride the “day of rest” aspect as being totally out of touch with modern society, we’re finding increasingly that we need that day of rest. Granted, we don’t drop all activities on Sundays but we generally end up with something like a half-day at minimum unallocated time.

Today on the other hand was truly manic! Since it was the day for my biology class it meant an early start for the kids with their Kumon which did have the upside that they’d a longer gap between that and the football. However, after football it was off to an audition so we ended up on the go ’til after 6pm: longer than a normal work-day!

Tomorrow is Wendy’s birthday so our normal schedule (OK, ragbag collection of things that we end up doing) will be thrown up in the air although I suspect that most of the birthday activities will take place in the morning and evening.

Differences in the questions and the interpretations of the answers on websites seems to be increasingly common lately.

At the top of the annoyances list is the bank which, as part of their security set up, asks what is your mother’s first name yet when asking you to confirm your security details asks what was your mother’s maiden name which, of course, is a completely different question and with a different answer.

Even more insidious is Facebook as I’ve just found out. I generally get around to looking at it once every couple of months so just got around to setting up a bit more of my profile on a whim a few weeks ago. One thing I noticed was that you can now say you’re in a relationship with somebody that’s on Facebook. The options under that are extremely limited for the complicated lives that people lead these days and basically look like they’ve been written back in the 1950s. Anyway, the only one that seemed to match up me and Wendy was “in a relationship”. Snag is that at the other end it asked Wendy to confirm that she was my girlfriend which doesn’t really equate to “in a relationship” to me and doesn’t really come close to describing said relationship seeing as James is now 8 and we’ve been together for getting on for 10 years.

Can’t people sort out these two-place questions?

Over the last year that Mum’s spent with us we’ve really began to notice that she’s slipping into old age and sometimes it seems that she’s doing it at quite an alarming rate.

For instance, in 2008 we all went on holiday to Venice and she was able, with not too much difficulty, to follow us round. Granted, not at a fantastic speed, but she managed it. Just over a year later it’s obvious that she’d have no chance of being able to do that as her walking ability has dropped dramatically in the last year.

She’s also gotten into the habit of repeating things that can get seriously annoying at times. We don’t really need to know that it’s rainy/sunny/whatever every 10 minutes or so! Whether she’s been doing that for a while is difficult to say as she wasn’t with us constantly before 2008 and indeed with us being over in France for the previous five years we didn’t get the chance to notice that anyway.

Related to that is the forgetfulness or rather the losing of the sense of time. On Saturday she was all set to go to church for instance. That’s fairly new though but I guess it’s something else that we’ll notice more as time goes on.

She’s not “old” generally but seems to be heading that way going by some of the things that we’ve been seeing.

By the time the shorter holidays swing round we seem to have built up a massive list of things that we should take the kids to. Summer isn’t so bad as there’s a couple of months to play with but it can get pretty bad during the shorter holidays like Easter.

In fact, Easter seems to be the worst of these. Not only do the kids and ourselves have a list of things that have accumulated since Christmas but there’s a whole host of activities going on aimed at kids all over the place. Almost all of these activities fall from the Saturday through to Easter Monday though so there’s not so many that you can actually get to and, on the whole, we always miss out on at least a couple that we’d have liked to have gotten to.

Over that Saturday to Monday period we always seem to end up with both of the little guys pretty much totally worn out and this year has been no different. Saturday ended up relatively quiet but we made up for that on Sunday and Monday with all day trips to Castleward and Portrush which left them both exhausted.

Still, at least we’d fairly grim weather on Tuesday which gave them (and us!) a bit of a chance to get some rest.