Year of pleasures #9: trips home

I had a bad blog week last week and skipped one, I promise I'll be good from now on!

I live quite a way from my folks, not in American terms I guess but it's a good five-hour drive from our home in London to theirs in Durham, south east to north east - definitely too far to pop round the corner for a cuppa! So I don't get to visit very often, especially with the price of train tickets and two kids in tow.

It means that when I do go home I try to squeeze in as many people as possible. We were up for less than 48 hours last weekend but we still managed to see my parents, my brother, my gran and uncle, two of my close friends and our closest family friends too! It might have been a fleeting visit but it was full of laughter, slightly chaotic but lots of fun.

I've lived in London for ten and a half years, and before that I was at uni for four; Hull and Arizona will always feel like home to me too. But Durham, where I grew up, where my family comes from, holds a special place for me. I love going home, back to my mum and dad, to the house I grew up in, the places I grew up in. And it's more than that: the north east is part of my identity, central to me. I've always thought that home is the place I feel loved, that it could be anywhere on earth as long as I'm with people I love. But I never feel more at home than when I'm there.

Year of pleasures #3: Family

I've been thinking a lot about family recently. My Grandpa wrote a kind of memoir about his ancestors and his life many years ago, and I'm in the process of typing it up digitally (it was written in the days before PCs, before word processors too, so he wrote the entire thing using a good old-fashioned typewriter). It's absolutely fascinating - I knew certain anecdotes about my dad's family, knew where people fitted into my family tree, the bare bones of the story, but now it's all coming to life. I feel closer to my ancestors, part of an ongoing narrative.

It's been a sad few weeks as well - Mark's Nanna passed away after months of ill-health, and it's the funeral tomorrow. Everyone grieves in their own way, but for me, as well as sadness, I feel the need to celebrate life too. It's made me think about the nature of family, and want to be close to mine so I can appreciate what they give me.

So this week's pleasure is my family; the family I was born into, the one I married and the one we've made for ourselves.

Now I am one

My niece turned one on Saturday so we headed over to Tim and Sarah's for a lovely family gathering in the sun. Happy birthday Sadie-May!

Family history

1900 map of Belfast: Avon Street is in the triangle at the top where the railtracks divide, just below the dock

I posted a few months ago about tracing our family tree in Northern Ireland. I've been trying to tie up a few loose ends since then, but without much success.

My great great grandmother, Elizabeth Jackson, was born in Aughnacloy, Co Tyrone, in 1878, and at some point moved to Belfast; she gave birth to daughter Frances Annie, my Gran's mum, in November 1900 in a place called Avon Street.

When we stayed in Belfast, we discovered that Avon Street had been demolished, but we found it on an old map in the Linen Hall library (just before my handbag was stolen, grr). It was in an area bordering the railway and just across from the docks, then one of the busiest in the world and the place where Titanic was built. According to our taxi driver, the area was popular with dock workers. It was something of a slum, too - the census returns we have for Avon Street show the houses consisted of only three rooms, some of them housing families of seven or more.

According to her birth certificate Frances Annie, my great grandmother, was born at 75 Avon Street. I searched a 1902 Belfast directory at the Linen Hall library and there were several Jackson families in the street, but none at 75. The Public Record Office has since sent me the census return for number 75; sadly it was unoccupied when the census was taken, so I've reached a bit of a dead end. All I can surmise is that at some point between the birth of her daughter and the census four months later, Elizabeth Jackson moved on.

The other mystery surrounds the identity of Frances Annie's father. Her birth certificate names William Graham; Elizabeth used to say that they were married but that he had died before their baby was born, from an illness caused by his work as a tanner. She also claimed that he was called Jimmy, not William.

We haven't been able to trace a marriage certificate, which suggests that Frances Annie was probably illegitimate. It's hard to know where to go from here - the truth may have died with my great great grandmother.

But we did discover one intriguing lead at PRONI - there was a Graham family living in Dee Street, round the corner from Avon Street, in 1901. They had several children, among them William, 19, and James, 25, neither married and both working in the iron industry. Elizabeth was 22 when she had her daughter; she may well have hung around with these Graham brothers. So perhaps the secret isn't lost after all.

Baked goods of the week

Gran and mum have been down for a visit, so I set Gran to work in the kitchen making a blackberry pie, a real favourite from childhood. Delicious!



Spot the family resemblance!

Homeward bound

With Gran and Grandad at Durham station, looking for choo choos.

Bedtime story with Grandad

Logan has a new Logan-sized chair at my folks' house in Durham, where we're staying til Sunday while Mark's in India. One of the things Ikea does right! And he's reading my Miffy books which are complete classics.

Cousins

Logan hanging out with the gorgeous Sadie-May - she definitely got the tall genes, she's going to tower over him before long!

At the Barking Dog

We're going back for dinner so 'review' later.