52 Ancestors 2020

52 Ancestors: Handed Down

As the youngest of four boys, I’m well versed in the concept of hand-me-downs. However, I feel that this isn’t what Amy Johnson Crow had in mind when this week’s theme was laid out, so I won’t even mention the very 1970s brown polyester trousers with the Tom & Jerry patch that I sported for about a fortnight in the late 1980s…

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52 Ancestors: Wedding

I have to say that this week’s theme has had me a bit stymied, hence why this 52 Ancestors post is so late. But I thought that I’d take a look through my family photos and pick out some wedding photos to share.

Turns out, I don’t have that many …

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52 Ancestors: Uncertain

This week’s 52 Ancestors prompt is an odd one for me. (Insert low-hanging joke about it making me uncertain as to what to write.)

But I thought I’d catalogue my current mysteries.

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52 Ancestors: Tombstone

Originally for this post for 52 Ancestors, I was going to get all creative and not do a post about an actual tombstone, or collection of tombstones, or anything to do with burial markers at all. I was going to go down the Tombstone, Arizona route and find me a cowboy or two.

But it turns out that I don’t have readily identifiable cowboys in my tree, in Arizona or otherwise.

But I do have family politics and farmers.

Yippie kayak, other buckets!

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52 Ancestors: Travel

I don’t have any travel agents in my tree, so this week’s theme for Amy’s 52 Ancestors had to take a different turn. Of course, my first thought was to talk about passenger lists and some wonderful Holborows who appear on multiple passenger lists, but as I’m working on my Holborows in Australia series (and other countries too!), and that I do have other family lines that aren’t Holborow related at all, I thought that it might be nice to switch gears and switch sides.

I actually got to thinking about the families that didn’t travel. The ones that stayed put. The ones whose lives were nevertheless impacted by the rumbling storm of the Industrial Revolution.

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52 Ancestors: Service

This week’s 52 Ancestors theme is ‘Service’. I suppose that this could mean military service, or perhaps somebody who was in service (I don’t know how wide-spread this term is, but here in the UK it refers to being in somebody’s domestic employ), or even somebody who was of service to their community.

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52 Ancestors: Where There’s A Will

I have a few way to go here in this post for 52 Ancestors. The full phrase, of course, is “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” meaning that if you’re determined enough in the face of adversity then a way forward can be found. Alternatively, it could be used to refer to wills in the sense of probate and legacies. A third option is the name, William.

Determination … Probate … Williams …

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52 Ancestors: Land

This week’s prompt by Amy Johnson Crow for 52 Ancestors got me thinking. Like the vast majority of people, I don’t have to go very far to find a cast of “ag labs” in my tree. Nor do I have to go into deep history: both my ‘English’ grandfathers (Frysol and Taplin) worked on farms, and and at least one of my American grandfathers were in the farming game at some point in their lives. But I don’t want to talk about that.

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52 Ancestors: Fire

I was initially slightly nonplussed by this week’s 52 Ancestors prompt: I have no firefighters in my tree, nor anybody who has lost their life or livelihood to fire (to my knowledge).

I do know that my Grampy Eddie was involved in a fire that cost him and 2 other families their cottages in Collingbourne Kingston in February 1934 (caused, allegedly, by a petrol engine backfiring and setting an oily rag alight). That plus a 300-year old barn full of sacks of wheat and cottages roofed with thatch spelled disaster.

But I thought that instead I would share something else; something more relevant to the devastating bushfires that ripped through Australia recently.

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52 Ancestors: Nearly Forgotten

I know, it’s been a while since I actually wrote a post for 52 Ancestors (in fairness, it’s been a while since I wrote a post at all), but I was having a thorough muse on this week’s theme and thinking about ancestral stories to share.

And then had a bit of a realisation …

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