More family history stuff

I'm still busy using up our free credit on the family history side of things so there won't be so many posts on here for a little while.

Had an exciting find today. We had a death certificate for one of my great grandfathers but were not 100% convinced it was his, so we put the details in italics to remind us to try and find out. Anyway, I knew the name of his surviving son and they were the correct age to have served in WWI (I am descended from one of his daughters).

Sometimes, you can find what you are looking for relatively quickly (excuse the pun) but no details were exact matches so I decided to investigate them all (15 of them). Eventually we struck lucky although his son, who we believed should have been in Northamptonshire was in fact in Nottinghamshire.

After about 5 pages I finally found his next of kin – it was his father – in the same hospital/workhouse we already had the death certificate for. Poor man, he died in 1933 and this link was finally proved correct by his son's attestation papers in 1915. Wonder if he was in there for all that time (died of cancer).

Yesterday had another piece of good luck. I had already found the Boer War and what I thought were all WWI attestation papers for one of my great great grandfathers (quite a fighting man judging by the amount of times he was arrested during service!!).

Then I found 7 other lots of papers for the same name. Investigated them all and eventually came across 57 of his papers for more WWI service plus letters he had written fighting to get his pension (he had served under one name, found out he was adopted and reverted back to his birth name after the war).

Good eh!

Quite a dull but warm day today so have been busy in the garden, planting up more vegetable, flower and wild flower seedlings. Just got to do 2 planters of night time stock and phlox and I'll be done.

Sheringham Country Park Part 2

Yesterday whilst walking around Sheringham Park, I mentioned that we stopped at a very special place to have our sandwiches. Here we are approaching it. 

Standing on the bridge waiting for the steam engine to 'blow' up our imaginary skirts (memories of childhood), then into a small museum room.

This is the place we stopped at, sitting on the platform under the lovely canopy, admiring the trains and gardens.

Finally the signal box and waiting room.

 

Sheringham Country Park

Today we drove to the above named place to walk around the area and take in the floral walk. The Azalea's and Rhododendron's are in bloom now and were fantastic. We didn't stay completely on this part of the trail as we wanted to do the 5 mile walk taking in a special part of it which I will show tomorrow.

The weather was around 19 Celsius when we started with a little high mist in the trees. This soon cleared and the temperature rose to 24 Celsius as we finished. By then we were hot and thirsty.

We had stopped for lunch at the 'special place' where we all had sandwiches and various drinks. It was lovely to just chill out in the shade, watch the world go by (including a school trip!) and realising how nice it was to now be free from being involved with such trips.

Herewith the photographs:

Here are the photographs after we left the place we had lunch:

These final three were taken from a viewing platform looking down on the forest of flowers:

Gardening, resting and doing the old family tree

Feeling hot and sultry already. Been busy in the garden planting up my two front window boxes plus two hanging baskets. Just letting them rest before putting them out. Hope to get my tomatillo's planted as well and maybe move on the peppers.

Hubby has been busy weeding the paths around the back garden. We are both sitting inside having a cup of tea and a small cake as a reward!

We've re-started tracing our family trees again after quite a break. It is amazing how much you forget where you had got to previously. Also, having just upgraded our Family Tree programme, we have got one free month on Ancestry – not that we can access everything we need though but it does give us access to other people's family trees – predominantly bad I have to say.

People seem to put all kinds of rubbish in their trees without verifying things. On the bright side, we did get good details from an unknown cousin (which we double checked) and her information was correct and filled in some blanks. Also have obtained one or two photographs of people, especially my g.g. grandmother, so that was nice.

We hadn't put ours on there but gave a partial copy to the husband of a cousin. They uploaded it and so... much of it is incorrect – don't know how they managed it as it was perfect when we gave it to them. They have the details for one g. grandmother attached to the details of a 'married in g. grandfather'!! That will send people off in the wrong direction completely. Ah well, generally it seems, some people think they can spend an afternoon on the computer and find all their relatives in an afternoon. Wrong!

We have being doing it since we first married many years ago and still have gaps which we can't yet verify. Thoroughly enjoy the hunt though. Received a certificate this morning for what we though was the death of a g.g.g. grandfather – nope – a 5 week old infant – ahh.

Anyway, enough of that, took another couple of photographs through the front window this morning:

Oriental poppies looking good and the peonies should be out very soon.

Happy Anniversay!

Welcome to my new follower Mrs. Sutton from Norfolk.

Today is our Wedding Anniversary and we will be going out tonight for a meal. Other than that, we don't really do anything but we plan on carrying on potting up plants and generally having a lazy day.

Yesterday, whilst at Houghton Hall Horse Trials, I took scenery photographs as we wandered around the course. Here they are:

 Then one of the side of the house, church and stable block:

As we wandered around the stalls area, we came across these lovely Alpaca's, then finally my lovely OH 'I wandered lonely as a cloud!':

 

Houghton Hall Horse Trials

As it was another nice day we headed off to Houghton Hall to see some of the horse trials. This meet has apparently been extended as Chatsworth, one of the qualifying meets for the Olympics, wasn't on due to the awful weather.

As we don't know much about this world, can't tell you who we saw but they were the 'lower echelon' as they only had 1* against their category. 2* and 3* are on at the weekend which we wanted to avoid as we knew it would be more busy.

Here are some of the horse pictures I took on my little camera. Tomorrow I will post scenery ones.

These are the ones taken by OH on his posher camera!

And... although not the best of pictures, it does prove that horses have NO feet on the ground when they gallop!!

 

We walked around almost the whole course which took us about 2 hours - so quite a long way.