Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Spare Oom

(Shamelessly nicked from a comment on a colleague's FB page...)

Yes indeed, even here in the coastal, rainy NW of England, we are blanketed in snow. I am wondering when the Faun and the Beavers are going to come traipsing down our street. Our SW visit was cancelled (we were due to go to their offices on the train but she couldn't get out of her road).

Mr Spouse has discovered a new fascinating hobby - genealogy. We needed to do our family trees but although his is small, it is also blank - so he's signed up for a couple of free trials on ancestry websites. My dad is particularly good at this and has given some hints and a nice book for Christmas, too. Mr Spouse's maternal grandmother has a rather unusual surname, only found in areas of the NW (not even as far north as us), with a very strange spelling. There only appears to be one family that migrated to where he comes from (only 20 miles from the core of the name) but they appear to have been single-handedly responsible for populating his home town. The grandmother was the youngest of 5 and her father was one of 11; he's only looked up the youngest great-great-uncle's family so far and he had 8 children. No wonder the parents of the great-grandfather died in their early 40s. They were exhausted.

We think they needed a telly.

If I ever needed any extensive family trees doing, I would just have to go to my mum's Mormon cousin. I'm all set.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My mother is one of seven and my father one of eleven (actually fourteen, but eleven by same mother). Why yes, it does make me feel like the family freak. However, we can blame religious adherence rather than lack of television.

The snow is very pretty. But slightly worrying.