Genealogy – I suspect that few people take
much interest in genealogy early in life; in my case, it was only in the second
part of my Father’s time, living with us in Woodley, that I started being
interested. Dad had put together a family tree covering his and my mother’s
family, mainly by talking to the generations “two back”. So shortly after Katie
and I were married he suggested I try to record her tree, and I tried to do
this by talking to her parents; much was straight-forwards, but attempts to go
very far back, or sideways, ended in more confusion than anything, as different
people had significantly differing memories. Indeed, Katie herself started
asking questions about certain family members that her parents didn’t want to
talk about, so it seemed prudent not to push matters too hard.
So as I say, in
Woodley my first interest was to try and write a computer program to help Dad
record his family tree – by first drawing the lines and boxes, with the aim to
save him the work in re-writing the pages as he got more and more information
from visiting Canadian relatives. This I did, and had just started to populate
it, when we found a commercial piece of software on sale, so I abandoned my own
program and started to use that. As the computer recorded “full dates” rather
than just years, and had space for more biographical information (places of
birth, death and burial, occupations etc.) I started asking Dad to recall as
much as he could of the older generation. Putting Dad’s information on computer
made me realise how much work he had done to record it all in the first place.
Having done that,
my interest was re-kindled, and we discovered the Family records centre in
London, at which we were able to confirm some of Katie’s family tree that was
previously vague, and we promised ourselves to do more when time permitted.
Then when Dad died in 2000, we had to get in touch with all the relatives he
had kept in contact with, and made contact with some by email – this has made
it possible to exchange information and update the tree easily. I also
discovered the autobiographies in his collection, and started transcribing them
to computer (Adrian typed out Dad’s, I did T W Moores
and Aunt Olive’s), which made me realise that their attitudes and circumstances
are far more interesting than the mere legal facts recorded on birth, death and
marriage certificates. We hope to get more information from Katie’s family on
subsequent visits north, now the software is portable on my “laptop” computer.
Gardening – I’ve already mentioned that Dad looked
after the garden for us when he joined us in 1982, we contented ourselves with
the pond and tree pruning (Bernard’s areas) and buying new plants (Katie’s).
Some … most … did well, but we had some calamities; buying an eucalyptus tree
for the back garden was the biggest mistake, because (a) we never saw any
koalas in it, and (b) it grew so fast it was unmanageable, and after a few
years we had to demolish it. The next most difficult tree was a twisted willow;
each year it grew from 8’ high to about 16’ high, so we had to prune it
annually; this lead to an abundant supply of decorative twisty sticks, which
sold in M&S for about £3 for 4, and which we gave away to whoever we could
offload them onto.
I’ve mentioned the squirrels hiding acorns
in our lawn … towards the end of our time there several had sprouted, and when
we moved to Embsay we had 3 baby oak trees in pots (which have now gone to good
homes). We also had a pear and an apple tree in the garden; the pear had been
blown over and we thought it might be dead – but no, it recovered. The apple
tree grew bigger, until just before leaving we had it pollarded
(the next owner confirmed that 2 years later it was laden with fruit again).
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