A leaving party was thrown in my honour this afternoon and this is the super amazing cake:

Family weekend

I managed to get Stephen up here for my last free weekend in New York. It's a shame, the poor git finally moves to the East Coast (just a four hour Chinatown bus ride away) and I "bugger off to England".

Adam snapped this picture of us at the top of the five flights of stairs to my apartment. Stephen wasn't such a fan of those. We had a pretty relaxed weekend, no rushing to see all the tourist sights, which we covered the last time he visited six (!) years ago.

Sunday we ate our last dinner with Dave and Adam & Lexia. We've been talking about making Poule au Pot, a 16th century French chicken dinner, for Adam our French literature fanatic, so it was now or never. It's good solid "peasant food" and the results were delicious and more than filling.

Saturday afternoon I traded stories of our family heroes and villains with my long lost cousin Cynthia Lovewell. Cynthia’s great-grandmother Elizabeth and my great-great-grandfather John were brother and sister. We’re part of the Ducie clan and there aren’t too many of us [link to Ducies make money not babies] so I was really excited to make contact with someone from this part of my family. The Ducies came from Ireland, via Birmingham, but they split up once they got to America with John settling in Montana and Elizabeth Ducie and husband Charles Chadwick making their own way to San Francisco. We swapped photographs and I got to tell her all about Mrs Ducey's saloon.

Cynthia and her husband John were terrific. Just what I would imagine a couple from California would be like: relaxed, friendly, youthful. They're coming to London in the fall so we have plans to meet up again. Maybe a trip to greater Birmingham is in the offing, how exciting does that sound? And we have a open invitiation to their beautiful big cabin at Lake Tahoe. It was a wonderful afternoon and nice that Stephen was in town. They got two Bovee/Ducies for the price of one!

New Doctor Who = Ahh-MAZING

I ate Blackhound three-layer chocolate mouse cake for breakfast. I'm out of weetabix, and, well, it needed finishing up. I think maybe salad for lunch today. And for dinner.

Dave and I played a for old time sake game of US Ticket to Ride last night before I switch my allegiance to euro rails. I started strong, but had to rethink some routes after he blocked me between San Francisco and Los Angeles. As the game was nearing the final round, I had completed 5 middle value routes worth 51 points. That’s respectable. With all routes in hand completed the usually course of action (assuming you have a few left over trains and a colour cards) is to grab one last set of 3 route cards in the hopes that with so many train segments already on the board you may with the addition of just a couple trains be able to complete an extra route and pick up a few extra points that might clinch you the game. I had just two trains to spare and one card in hand, but I couldn’t be sure I had Dave beat, so I decided to risk it and grabbed three cards.

My worthy opponent

To my astonishment, I could complete two of them (both high value routes) with the addition of just one train piece between Seattle and Vancouver. And the third route I already had. I took an extra 49 points in two turns! When we counted up at the end Dave came in at 146, normally a winning score. But I was sitting on 68, and with 49 + 51 points, that was a round 100, which meant, with the scoring marks round the outside of the board running only 1-100, I had done a whole other lap and my marker stayed put. We had planned to play a second round, but this was the game to end on. A stunning victory for yours truly!

Watching Dexter (series 2). Such a guilty pleasure.

Century old mystery even more solved

Two months ago I declared a century old mystery solved. Well it turns out there's more to the story.

Having found the marriage of my grandmother's cousin Edith Ward (whose father had run off to Canada under an assumed name with his son-in-law's sister), I ordered up the microfilm with births and baptisms for Montreal. I found Edith and her two sons, which actually pointed me back to some online records which I had already searched with no results. Turns out the indexing doesn't include first names, so now I had the church they used from the microfilm, I pulled up all the Ward records for Grace Anglican Church of Montreal.

I found the burial of my auntie Flora May and the full register entry for Edith's baptism. And as there were only 30-odd records for the period in question, I had a peek at all of them. Working my way back from 1940 (the last record available online) to 1909 when my great-great grandfather Arthur Woodcroft now known as Albert Ward arrived in Montreal, I was looking for a marriage for Albert and May, but I found something else. The burial on 27 Aug 1910 of a little girl named Isabel, parents: Albert Arthur and Flora May Ward. Her birth date was noted as 27 Feb 1910, four months after Albert arrived in Canada. So here was a part of the story I wasn't even looking for. Arthur and May had left England because there was a child on the way. They weren't fleeing scandal - May's sisters all had children out of or very shortly after wedlock - I'm inclined to think they really wanted a family together. Arthur had left behind a unhappy marriage, but May's family was a happy and tight-knit bunch. She could easily have returned to them after the loss of Isabel, but she didn't. She stayed with Albert and they had another daughter seven years later.

It was an exciting find, but the best bit was telling Mum what I had discovered. There are still a few things left to wrap up - Albert's death, May's ship's passenger list - but more importantly, with the baptisms of Edith's two sons I now have their full names. They are my parents age so most likely living, and I found two iterations of each name in the Canadian phone directory. I've been practicing a little speech. I'm not a huge fan of genealogy cold calling, but I hope the accent and little bit of much-rehearsed charm will keep them on the phone long enough for me to establish if there is a connection. The rewards could be big: fingers are crossed for a (otherwise non-existent) picture of my great-great grandfather, and of course the last few details of a story that has intrigued my family for a century. Wish me luck!

It's official

I have given notice at my job and am moving back to England. I've been obsessed with genealogy for nearly six years now and it's time to go learn more and do it full time. England is the best place to be for that and I've dreamed of going home ever since the day I arrived here in New York. I'll be staying in the city through April, then dropping all my stuff off with my sister in Atlanta - she'll mind it in case I decide to come back - and then heading to England. It's strange to be leaving New York, but I've been thinking about it seriously for the last few months and now is the right time. Even my Dad agrees, and he's put the stops on some crazy ideas I've had over the years - like spending several months in Wisconsin in the winter!? - so it must be a good idea. I've always missed England and I can't wait to get there.

I can't wait to live in a flat with it's own washing machine again! I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate going to the laundromat. Six flights of stairs and I have to pass the posh sushi place looking like a bag lady. Sit in the cold waiting area. Can never concentrate on my book.

Back in the day, when Lauren lived with Lexia I used to accompany her to the very same laundromat. I remember watching (rather appropriately) the diving and swimming competitions at the Athens Olympics. So some happy memories.

But now I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it!

Who Do You Think You Are? - US

I've just watched the first two episodes of the US version of WDYTYA. I was afraid they'd make a horrible mess of what in England is a perfect show. I feared excessive sentimentality and oppressive voiceover. But I was pleasantly surprised. There is very little voiceover, and I liked that most of it is done by the celebrities themselves. I thought they got the tone pretty right as well. My only grumble is the coming up next highlights and the recap that sandwich the commercial breaks. It's such a terrible waste of time and meant that they only had time to cover one side of person's family. It also meant it's impossible to get the element of mystery and anticipation that works so well in the English version. "Coming up later in the program..." No, I'm sorry that just doesn't fly. As far as the stories themselves, Emmitt Smith's tale of mixed race slave ancestors is something I've seen already in Ainsley Harriott's UK episode. But Sarah Jessica Parker's Salem witch trials connection was truly fascinating.

I've also been able to watch three episodes online of Prof Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s series for PBS, Faces of America. I've heard some grumbling about this show, that is has a strong message of America's intolerance towards immigrants and that Gates himself is too prominent. I decided to give it a shot anyway, and enjoyed it. Instead of focusing on one person's lineage at a time, the four programmes each have an overall theme and incorporate elements of the 12 participants family histories. I really liked his attempt to tell their stories in the wider context of the building this extraordinary nation, however flawed.

Jonathan was academic bowl team captain for one round this weekend. They trounced the other side by 70 points. Next stop University Challenge!

Tombstone Tuesday

Apparently on Tuesday's genealogy bloggers like to post about tombstones. You supposed to upload a picture of a gravestone and tell it's story. I'll give it a try.

This is the gravestone for Truman Bovee, my great-grandfather George Bovee's youngest brother who died in a tragic accident.

Now let's be honest, this thing is hideous! But it's undeniably eye-catching. I went to the cemetery in Fairchild, WI in December and as you can see it was blanketed in at least a foot of snow. Any row markers were covered and I had started to despair that I would find anything.

And then I spotted this monstrosity. I couldn't help but look at it and to my delight I saw the name Bovee. Below the name is a short poem that touchingly expresses the awful pain his family must have felt at his loss. To the left I found the graves of his parents, both buried in the snow. I dug them out with the ice scraper from my rental car. And to the right was a tiny little grave marker for Hiram Cornell Bovee, George Bovee's little son who died just days after birth.

My great-great grandparents, a lost son and a lost grandson. I don't think cemeteries are by nature grim and mournful places. I like to think of myself as being not among the dead but among the living, for their lives feel very real to me and I know they're not truly gone. But in this place it was hard not to feel sorry and a little sad.

Look at that face!

Mad Men

BBC is showing Mad Men Series 3. This is the best thing on telly in the US, but we don't have it at my apartment so I missed the last series. This means I don't have to wait 6 months for it come out on DVD. Or buy it from iTunes. I can watch it for free on iPlayer. Which I paid for. Whatever. Bravo BBC!!

Century old mystery solved

I hold in my hand the smoking gun! Actually it’s a printout of a marriage at the Montreal Salvation Army 1936, so a metaphorical, genealogical smoking gun. But no less exciting.

My 2x great-grandfather Arthur Woodcroft disappeared. He was in Luton in 1906 when his daughter Beatrice married Thomas Dellar, but by the 1911 census he is gone. The story that has come down through the family is that he legged it to Canada with his new son-in-law’s sister, Flora May Dellar. Think about it...that would be pretty scandalous even now. According to her niece, Auntie May was a tall, attractive and vivacious woman, one of the renowned, or rather notorious, Dellar sisters of High Town (more on them later). May is pictured below (center) as a bridesmaid at the wedding of her elder sister.

The other half of the story is that a woman name Edith Summerton showed up in the fifties claiming to be Arthur and May’s daughter. Visiting from Montreal, she said she wanted to get to know her family. She visited England once or twice and then lost touch again. What exactly became of Arthur and May has remained a mystery and Auntie Madge has repeatedly expressed a desire to learn the truth before she passes on. Mum has been searching for Arthur for 40 years, and in the last few years I too have joined the hunt. We want to do right by Auntie Madge, and of course, solve the mystery. Mum mentions Arthur all the time, and I’ve tried several searches but always came up empty handed. Until yesterday that is.

I had a hunch in the bath (such a great place to think) that I needed to look again, this time for Edith’s husband, Nelson Summerton. New records come online every day, and up popped my marriage record, on the 6th of May, 1936 at the Montreal Salvation Army, a Nelson Summerton married Edith Marion Dellar Ward, daughter of Albert Ward and Flora May Ward. Edith Marion Dellar W. and Flora May W. are a dead give away. Albert Ward is a pseudonym (same initials as Arthur Woodcroft), no wonder we couldn’t find him, the crafty so and so.

We had figured he must have travelled to Canada under an assumed name, and as soon as I put this new name into a search of ship’s passengers I came up with Albert Ward, 45 year old straw hat manufacturer (the ubiquitous Luton profession), who sailed on the Corinthian for Montreal in Nov 1909. May must have followed on shortly after as she is living with him as his “wife” on the Canadian census for 1911.

So the stories were true, and Edith Summerton was, as she claimed, Madge’s cousin. Of course there’s more to find. Did Arthur/Albert and May actually marry (making Arthur officially a bigamist, not just a bit of a scoundrel)? Were/are there more Canadian cousins? And why did he choose the pseudonym Ward? Beatrice Woodcroft's daughter Doris Dellar, my grandmother, became a Ward when she married; it’s my mother’s maiden name. But Doris wasn’t even born when Arthur and May ran off together. It’s just a funny little coincidence. Right?

It's finally here. I just downloaded the free ancestry.com genealogy ap for my iPhone. Now I can access all my family tree info anytime. This is glorious.

White Christmas

Dallas's first white Christmas since 1926 and only Genevieve's second Christmas in the United States. I thought it awfully nice of Dallas to put on a festive display for me.

Family Not at Home Evening

There are many times of year when it feels like New York is at it's best. But December is special, with, as the song says, "City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style, In the air there's a feeling of Christmas." It seems a shame not to make the most of it, so on my first night back in the city, my friend John and I ventured out to enjoy the Christmas lights.

First stop, Rockerfeller City to see the tree and the angels,

and the snowflakes on Saks Fifth Avenue.


I love the blue tree lights at Columbus Circle

and the grand Christmas stars indoors.

And of course we went to Macy's on 34th Street. We didn't go up to visit Santa, but I'm sure he's the real one!

This year's windows celebrated writing letters to Santa. I don't remember if I ever sent a letter to the North Pole, but many years I got just what I wanted, so somehow he knew. Clever ole Santa!

Happy Christmas everyone!

I picked up a new book at the airport on the way to Jerusalem (the story of an old house on Bankside in London), and found a passage that beautifully conveyed my own feelings about searching out people's histories.

"The vast mass of men and women in every time do not leave behind them either renown or testimony. These people walked our streets, prayed in our churches, drank in our inns, built and lived in the houses where we have our being today, opened our front doors, looked out our windows, called to each other down our staircases. They were moved by essentially the same passions and griefs that we are, the same bedrock hopes and fears...

Witness to the living, busy, complex beings that many of these vanished ones were tends to be limited to fleeting references on pages of reference books that are seldom opened. Scant evidence, you may say, of lives as vivid and as important to the bearers as our own are today to us. But by putting these scraps together, sometimes, with luck, something more coherent is achieved. Pieces of lost lives are genuinely recovered. Here and there a few individual figures detach themselves from the dark and silence to which time has consigned them. They walk slowly towards us. Eventually, we may even see their faces." **

I went back to Bedford County Record Office yesterday to read the minute books from the Luton Poor Law Union. Huge registers where the Clerk recorded the day to day happenings at the workhouse and the maintenance of poor families in the area. The references to my family members indeed are fleeting, but I got a glimpse into some of my ancestors lives, sadly because it's the workhouse records, at some of the most distressing times in their lives.

Annie Maria Ward (my 2x great grandmother) admitted herself to the workhouse on the 28th of May 1917. She was 73 and for the aged and destitute the workhouse often served as a last stop. It says she was a Wesleyan, a former washerwoman, and the widow of James Ward, a well sinker. Annie lived four years in the workhouse and died on 15 May 1921 at 06.30. I've been told that hearts often fail in the morning when heart rates are low, and when I checked her death certificate it gave cause of death as cardiac disease. What a long, hard life she must have lived.

My 4x great grandfather John Woodcroft was born in the picturesque village of Whipsnade, but we found him as an adult living in nearby Kensworth. The Minutes record an examination - an inquiry into which parish should foor the bill for his poor relief - of John in 1855 and note he was legally settled in Whipsnade but had been living in Kensworth since Christmas last. What necessitated the uprooting of his family in the dead of winter? It notes that he had become chargeable - on the dole - because of his wife's sickness. I smiled to myself - poor John always had a sick wife. He worked his way through four in just 30 years. They just kept dying on him. Much sorrow for one person to endure.

My many times great uncle Thomas Osborn applied to the Board of the Luton Poor Law Union for the sum of 4 pounds 10 shillings to emigrate with his wife and seven children to Australia. I sympathise with his desire to start a new life half way across the world, and I admire his gumption for asking for the cash to do it.

The last story I followed in the records was that of my 3x great grandmother Mary Ann Rayner. We saw on the 1881 census that she was blind in later life, but I learned this was a condition she had all her life. Her eyes were examined at the behest of the Board in April 1853 to "determine if the girl's sight might be improved by undergoing an operation." Two weeks later they wrote to a London eye hospital inquiring if she could be admitted - in a moment of foresight they kindly noted the full name and address of the hospital in the Minutes. At this point I was getting anxious... would they make the investment and send her after all? On 13th of May her District Officer was instructed to take Mary Ann to the Central London Opthalmic Hospital. I was hopeful, but sadly the last entry two weeks late noted that the hospital had written reporting that "nothing could be done for Mary Ann Rayner and requesting that she might be removed." The trip to London was a dead end for Mary Ann, but it gave me a new avenue of inquiry. I shall contact the hospital (still treating eyes to this day) to see if their records survive. There may yet be more fragments of Mary Ann's story to piece together.

**from The House By The Thames by Gillian Tindall

Griff Rhys Jones is my hero. Along with William Tyndale, Ralph Nader, and whoever thought of putting peanut butter in M&Ms.