About This Blog

I was born in 1946, a year after the second world war ended, and became one of the ever increasing generation of “Baby Boomers”.

My father served in the Royal Air Force during the war, but had actually joined up in 1936 when he was sixteen years old, as an engineering apprentice. He was lucky enough to survive the war, and once demobbed, he obtained a good job in London.

He and my mother met during the war. My father was the son of a Post Office worker, at that time a “white collar job”, so fulfilled the criteria at that time of belonging to the lower middle class. On the other hand, my mother was of working class stock. Her father worked in a shoe factory and clocked in every morning at 7.30 am, working until 5.30pm five days a week. However, they had managed to buy their own house in the 1930’s for the pricely sum of £400.

When I was born, my parents were living with my maternal grandparents, and although this only lasted for a couple of years, I always had a strong bond with my grandparents, and spent much of my childhood with them.

My grandmother’s parents were both still alive, living in a small rented cottage not far away, so I became quite familiar with them and their way of life.

In later years these memories awakened an interest in my roots, in particular the ancestors on the maternal line of the family.

Nowadays, of course, it is easy to trace one’s ancestry on line, but I was also lucky enough to have memories and souvenirs as far back as three generations.

This prompted me to go back at least one more generation to try to find out more about my great, great grandmother on my mother’s side, and write this blog as a record of what I discovered.