Things you dun on New Year's Eve

[Oldddudders]

Not me - I'm far too lazy to go through it all - but Deb decided to look into my maternal side this evening. I now know my grandmother's forename - Ruth - and her birthplace - Reigate - only 3 miles from my own. What's more she was born in the post office in station approach (it seems unlikely her mum had gone in to buy stamps, they obviously ran the place). Since she died before I was 5 you will recognise I have no great recall of this lady. Courtesy of Genes Reunited, Deb carried gaily on, with input by me as appropriate. So my Great Great Grandfather, 1811 - 1861, I now know to have been a professional cricketer (I had half an idea) who played for Sussex and the England United XI. I'm still not sure what year he toured to Australia, but it must have been about 1830-40, when railways were still a true novelty! How on earth (literally) did you fix a sporting event when it took two months for a letter to arrive?

[coachmann]

Been watching a movie with Gary Cooper and wondering which of the tablets the whisky will fall out with. Just pacing myself at the moment, which is why you find me on here. Her indoors is outdoors looking for a piece of coal. Think I'll lock her out so I don't have to listen to some soddin bagpipes, Auld Lang Syne followed by the usual tears. Better get the black coffee ready then.. So all the best for a Happy New Year lads and laddettes and may 2011 be kind to you.

[PhilJ W]

The first England test tour to Australia did not take place until 1876/77. The first international match was between Toronto and New York in 1840! The first XI to tour overseas was in 1859 to Canada.

As an old hand at researching my family I can tell you not to take anything passed down as gospel. For example I always was led to understand that my fathers family was very wealthy, it turned out that they were not very wealthy at all! But I did find out that one of my Great-Great Grandfathers on my mothers side was a millionaire! However very little if any of that wealth has come down to me, it may be something to do with his having at least 15 children.

[Guest Max Stafford]

Well, I've just had a home-made toddy to ward off the stinking chest cold I've bee lumbered with. I have a glass ready to toast the new year in, Just away to open the doors and let the old one out - good riddance too!

 

All the best, lads!

 

Dave.

[coachmann]

All the best...........

[Ozexpatriate]

All the best...........

Yes, Happy New Year everyone.

[Colin_McLeod]

Happy New Year everyone, and may 2011 be an excellent year.

[bluebottle]

In between drams, I'd like to wish a Good New Year to one and all, and many may you see. In between drams, I'd like to wish a Good New Year to one and all, and many may you see.

(That's once for each set of keys on this keyboard). (That's once for each set of keys on this keyboard). Sláinte! Sláinte!

 

Gordon Gordon

[Pete the Elaner]

After installing a catch point & motor on the layout this afternoon, I saw the new year in with a friend while playing snooker.

I'm now looking forward to making progress with 3½ layouts in 2011!

[Rugd1022]

Finished work early last night thanks to the new Didcot Signalling Centre being 'switched in' a day early, so came home and slobbed out in front of the goggle box with the missus and a couple of bottled beers. Dozed off in the armchair, to be woken by the fireworks going off outside!

 

Olddudders - this ancestry lark is addictive.... I found out a while ago that my maternal great gandfather and possibly two of his relatives started as cleaners at Westbourne Park Shed, I'd heard about them in passing many years ago but there's more digging to be done there. It also transpires that my paternal grandmother had a sister and brother I never knew existed!

 

Happy New Year all

 

Nidge

[Oldddudders]

Finished work early last night thanks to the new Didcot Signalling Centre being 'switched in' a day early, so came home and slobbed out in front of the goggle box with the missus and a couple of bottled beers. Dozed off in the armchair, to be woken by the fireworks going off outside!

 

Olddudders - this ancestry lark is addictive.... I found out a while ago that my maternal great gandfather and possibly two of his relatives started as cleaners at Westbourne Park Shed, I'd heard about them in passing many years ago but there's more digging to be done there. It also transpires that my paternal grandmother had a sister and brother I never knew existed!

 

Happy New Year all

 

Nidge

And a HNY to you, too Nidge!

 

Deb has been diligently going at this - but then on her mother's side she had a head-start, with her grandfather being a genealogist who had traced his lineage back to the C14, and she now has names before 1066 I think. Must admit I've been a bit me (i.e. curmudgeonly!) about the new relatives she found for me. My father changed his name in 1938, and we only found this out when we went to register his death, so Deb had a field-day some years back, sorting out all sorts of persons, livid and deaf - sorry, living and dead - who are/were blood relatives. I'm afraid I find such people rather less interesting than those I might get to know on here, where we actually have in interest in common. Not having kids ourselves (by design) means we don't have young people enquiring, but clearly Deb gets a buzz from matching large chunks of tree with others on Genes ReU.

 

Sadly, no-one she has unearthed in either family has any connection with railways before me. I, too, would be pleased to be related to cleaners at Westbourne Park Shed, although I might prefer Battersea, I suppose!

[The Stationmaster]

Happy New Year one and all. We watched the London Eye fireworks on tv - brilliant apart from some abysmal BBC camerawork/production.

 

And as for genealogy I tend not to bother although my dad was deeply into it and a remote cousin on that side (who we only discovered about 12 years ago) has done an enormous amount of work to the extent of uncovering a second Archbishop although still not entirely proving a papal link. However we do have oddments going right back to what appears to be the arrival of the family name in England in 1066 - I sometimes wonder if that one was handy at archery Incidentally one oddity arising from having immigrant forebears is that a railway station in France has the same name as my surname, I've even got the signalling diagram for it .

 

Mrs Stationmaster has been diligently going back through her various lot over the last couple of years extending into seemingly ever more remote Cornish parishes as she's gone and duly uncovering one who spent sometime in Bodmin Gaol and another who was transported to Australia after engaging in a spot of arson in Penzance. Left me wondering what sort of family I'd married into

PS Seeing Nidge's post reminds me that I omitted the railway element. One of the earliest I can claim is my paternal grandmother's uncle who was an Asst Stationmaster at York in the 1890s then a great grand-father on that side who was Ganger on Naburn swingbridge; my father's stepmother's father was on the Perway on the NER, and then one of dad's uncles who was a Coach Body Builder in York Works duly followed into the works by his son and then a grandson who was on the North Eastern Region until he was 'hived-off' to NCL in 1968.

 

Not so much on my mother's side - one of her grandfather's retired from the GWR as a PerWay Ganger in 1926 (by odd coincidence one of the very few GWR magazines I have includes him in a list of retirements, and it gives me a familial link with the broad gauge) and her brother worked briefly as a Lad Porter and then Goods Shunter on the GW before going to work in farming.

[Rugd1022]

My other half, Sue has been dipping into her family tree too, we already knew that several folk on both sides were railwaymen / women, all on the GWR in the Thames Valley and Swindon areas. We found out that her paternal grandmother was born in the railway village at Swindon which gives us both a warm glow when we think about it. The names which crop up seem a far cry from those which are common these days, one of Sue's great aunts was called Mable Sable! Her husband (great uncle) George was a driver but we're not sure where, we know they lived in Maidenhead so it could have been Reading, Slough, Southall or even (hush now) the mighty Old Oak. With a bit of lateral thinking there's a possibility that our two families could have crossed paths at some point, my Westbourne Park based cleaners probably becoming firemen and later drivers, if they moved to Old Oak when it opened in 1906. More digging required methinks.

 

Battersea....hmm, is that somewhere south of Paddington, in the land of Malachite...?

 

Nidge

[Oldddudders]

My other half, Sue has been dipping into her family tree too, we already knew that several folk on both sides were railwaymen / women, all on the GWR in the Thames Valley and Swindon areas. We found out that her paternal grandmother was born in the railway village at Swindon which gives us both a warm glow when we think about it. The names which crop up seem a far cry from those which are common these days, one of Sue's great aunts was called Mable Sable! Her husband (great uncle) George was a driver but we're not sure where, we know they lived in Maidenhead so it could have been Reading, Slough, Southall or even (hush now) the mighty Old Oak. With a bit of lateral thinking there's a possibility that our two families could have crossed paths at some point, my Westbourne Park based cleaners probably becoming firemen and later drivers, if they moved to Old Oak when it opened in 1906. More digging required methinks.

 

Battersea....hmm, is that somewhere south of Paddington, in the land of Malachite...?

 

Nidge

Malachite was a temporary aberration, perhaps, but yes, I admit to a strong Southern bias. After all, the South Eastern Railway branch to Reading was just across the field from my childhood home, and the LBSCR route to Portsmouth only a couple of miles away. The Battersea of my fantasy relative would have had yellow-ochre locos, many of them tiny tank engines, all with names gaily painted on them. Exotic sounding "Trocadero" and "Vienna" would have shared a roundhouse with more prosaic "Chalvington" and "Lodsworth". I recognise the GWR could name an engine, too, and "Atalanta" and "Fire Queen" from the same sort of era sit pretty well, too. As for people's names, my mother's forenames (she was born in Kilburn) were Mabel Annie Winifred, always known as Win, while my Geordie father was given Howard Algernon as forenames, which he changed to John Howard, although still known as Howard. No idea why he changed his surname, and now I never will!

[Jim the Tram]

Happy New Year all!

 

When I was between jobs I started doing some Family Tree Research & found out how addictive & time consuming it can be! My background is seafaring & farm labourer so no great wealth anywhere unfortunately

 

Still suffering from the lurghy that seems pretty common this Xmas & New Year so just saw the NY in & then went to bed dosed up!

[Guest Dutch_Master]

Well, I started the New Year as I ended the last one: DIY-ing in the night... Some ******** threw a fireworks bomb into the communal gallery, which blew out a window in my house as well as one in the neighbours house downstairs. Fortunately I had enough wood spare to cover both holes for the time being, much to the relief of the 2 Asian ladies who live below me. Did ruin my evening though, after a particularly annoying day at work...

[Kenton]

Happy New Year to one and all.

 

Ancestry !! hmmm you have reminded me of a question I had been pondering asking.

My wife has been tracing her family history, being a Bruce, I think there was a vague and distant hope that some way back trace could be made to a certain Robert the ... sadly not. However along the way it turns out that her grandfather was a steam engine driver and some other relative was reported on his death certificate as "being run down by a steam loco"!! As this sort of incident cannot have been that common we both were wondering if records of such incidents were kept. (early 1900)

 

On my side, my father's family has been well researched and taken back many 100 years. My father was the only one to have worked on the railway (and then only for a short period, prior to and during the early part of WWII) and the only claim to any fame (or infamy) is being a direct relative of James Hammett - a notorious troublemaker of the early 1800's.

[Oldddudders]

Well blow me down. Deb has now found some great great uncle on my father's side who was a railway clerk, and his brother a railway labourer - in 1881. In Newcastle, which isn't all that far from where railways began.

[Wherry Lines]

I must admit to not being terribly interested in genealogy at the moment. Mind you, I'm only 23, so I've got plenty of time to do the research!

 

All I know of family I never met was that my great-grandfather (mothers side) was a grammar school teacher. My mother and grandmother are both adamant that this is reason why I am training to become a teacher, albeit at primary level.

 

I suppose genealogy is something that begins to get more interesting later in years - as your appreciations and all that jazz change...

[Kenton]

I suppose genealogy is something that begins to get more interesting later in years - as your appreciations and all that jazz change...

Which is a pity, because when you start at an older age you will find that all those uncles and aunts with memories of their elder relatives have long since passed away before you have been able (interested enough) to ask.

 

It is something you find as you grow older, memories fade and become confused or simply cease to exist.

[Horsetan]

I spent the New Year watching "Father Ted"

[Penlan]

.........It is something you find as you grow older, memories fade and become confused or simply cease to exist.

That's because when people pass away, they take ALL their memories with them, nothing left for us to appreciate.

 

Geneology is a bug, worse than railway modelling, it can take up a lot of time.

I tried it for two years, got plenty of generations (back to 1548 on one line), but oh the correspondance it generated.

 

I realised there's more to life than the dead past (although there were some spicy goings on....), so I eased off and let one of my cousins take over, she's taken to the amber nectar I hear now .

[Oldddudders]

Which is a pity, because when you start at an older age you will find that all those uncles and aunts with memories of their elder relatives have long since passed away before you have been able (interested enough) to ask.

 

It is something you find as you grow older, memories fade and become confused or simply cease to exist.

Bang on. In 2004 - but before we realised quite how soon we would be leaving the UK - we took a daffy of ancient photos down to Hayle to my sole remaining aunt. She was indeed able to provide some details of who and where "Oh, that must be Frinton in 1922", being a thoroughly with-it 89, in contrast to her husband, who had turned 90 physically fit and still charming, but with no grip on reality at all. Within 3 months Margaret had passed on from cancer, so that was that.

[petethemole]

Without casting any aspersions on the researches of previous posters, I'd like to point out a common misconception. The term "engine driver" in old official documents such as census, birth/death certs etc, doesn't necessarily mean a railwayman; the term was also applied to traction engine/road locomotive drivers and to operators of static engines in mills etc. My late grandfather's WW1 trade in the RE was "engine driver", but he actually operated a petrol generator for searchlights at a naval base in Ireland, followed by a Tilling-Stevens petrol-electric AA searchlight lorry on the Western Front.

 

Good luck with your family trees folks,

Pete

[pH]

My wife and I have done some digging on our family trees, but neither of us is much interested in going back beyond our great-grandparents. We each knew most of our grandparents (a couple were dead before we were born), and we are interested in their parents, but after that there’s no real personal connection. Even going just that far back, though, there were some surprises, and official records didn’t always agree with family accounts (or should that be the other way round?).

 

As far as railway connections are concerned, I’ve been told that a relative was an engine driver with the Caledonian Railway at Irvine (there can’t have been too many of them). My grandfather worked on the Union Pacific in Cheyenne, Wyoming but he had served his time as a slater, so that was most likely on construction and maintenance of buildings. Two of my grandmother’s brothers were foremen on track maintenance gangs for a US railroad (I don’t know which one) in Buffalo, New York state. There is a family photograph (perhaps staged) of them standing in front of a pile of ties in a railyard, each with a revolver stuck in the waistband of his pants!

 

As others have said, if you’re at all interested in family history, ask questions of relatives while they are still around. There are so many things we vaguely remember being told, but can’t quite recall, and now have nobody to ask.

 

As to what I did on New Year’s Eve - sat in front of the TV with a glass of Chivas and watched ‘The Last Waltz’. A good way to end the year.