On staying with a friend, Andy Worman, in Norwich, I was writing his genealogy out for him, a full map of his ancestors, on various bits of paper. On a trip to the sea we passed through his mothers ancestral village of Hempnall, a place of so many fond memories for him and his brother, Hugh. Many of their relatives had lived there cousins, aunts and uncles, for which they'd all been known locally as the 'second royal family'. Some of them did indeed have an attitude of being important. And yet now not one remained in the village. Andy and Hughs grandfather was well respected in the village, ginger haired, doing good works, not strong enough to be sent to war, and he being a Methodist and a lay preacher. On looking more at their genealogy, I saw that one ancestor, Henry Howe and his son in law, George Wigger (who was a silk weaver) had run the Half Moon Inn on King Street in Norwich. George Wigger had got into some scrapes in his time which were duly recorded in the papers; his being attacked by a lad on King Street; and a drunkard in the pub bashing the eye of Georges wife, knocking her to the ground. One thing about staying with Andy was his mountains of books. In one book it was reorded that in olden times colic pains in ones tummy were thought to be due to a snake having got in there, either through the swallowing of snake spawn or due to one having climbed in through ones open mouth while sleeping.
In one Norse legend, a King Olaf Tryggvason used brute force to christianise the heathen Vikings of Iceland, one story about him confronting a particularly staunch Icelander. I do know from my mothers strong Viking DNA analysis that we have Icelandic Viking connections during those times of transition from the old beliefs into the new religion imported from the Near East. This staunch fellow was tortured and yet still would not give up his spirituality, at which point a snake was pushed down his throat by the Christian converts who applied red hot irons to its tail to force it in. This snake, according to the story, later thrust its head out through the Icelanders abdomen with the poor fellows heart between its jaws. This was enough to get the other Icelanders to leave behind their beloved traditions and to embrace the new Christianity. Some famed monks, Cosimas and Damien, were renowned for getting snakes to leave the bodies of colic sufferers. They are also known to have performed an early transplant, taking the leg of a dead 'Negro' and putting it successfully onto a church servant who had been suffering gangrene. This man was able to live many years more with one black leg and one white.
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I made another long journey from central London out to the Kew Archives. Not that I made such grand discoveries as last time. Seeking my ancestral Maxteds in a big book of Nine Elms railway employees yielded nothing. But I did find a few things which had so far eluded me. And that was just by accessing Find My Past, information I'd not been able to find on the Ancestry website. I had already sussed out, by deduction, that my ancestor Robert Bunney (Senior) had married an Ann Aylward, but had never found a marriage record confirming this till now (my deduction had been due to Alyward being used down generations as a middle name for various children). It was at the church of Mary Magdalene (of course lol) that they had married one another on 26th February 1764 in Bermondsey. And I found my Welsh ancestor John Harrisons school admissions for the hamlet of Pwlldu, , in both 1876 and 1877, recording that the familys adress was at 'Lower Bank' and that his father worked as (yes I knew) an ostler. What I was really pleased with was at last finding Thomas Sugrues baptism, which was in Greenwich in 1854 at the Roman Catholic church of Our Lady of the Sea. Thomas's birthday was here recorded (a good find) as being on 24th Febfuary (making him an Aries), the baptism having been on 26th March. His godparents were Michael and Maria MacDonnell. I found Roman Catholic baptisms for Thomas's siblings too, for Joanna, Catherine, Jacobus, Edmund and the twins Daniel and Bartholomew. Interestingly I discovered also that the childrens father, Bartholomew Sugrue, had also had a child with his first wife, Ellen, who had died of Asiatic cholera. I'd never seen anything to prove before that they'd had a baby together, but there she was, a daughter, Anna, born in 1847, her godparents being Corey Malvina and Margaret Gallachan.
On meeting an old friend, Dale Topsom, by the lions at Trafalgar Square, I guided us to the church of St Martin in the Fields which was open at last (third time lucky), my inspiration being for Dale and I to kneel at the altar, facing one another, in an enactment of the marriage, which had taken place within this very church, of my ancestors Philip Barton and Hannah Bunney. This did feel quite magical and special. More than any of the other London churches I'd lately visited, this one was especially vibrant, an energy there, maybe the presence of my ancient loved ones. So this little enactment felt quite sacred. Outside Buckingham Palace, in a spirit of fun, I announced that as a more authentic descendant of this lands royals, being myself of the Tudors, that this should rather be my palace but that the Queen has locked me out. Dale Topsom was still into genealogy, like me, he being the one who had introduced me to this. His Topsom male line he had traced back to a foundling left on the churrch steps in the Devon village of Topsham. His DNA was mostly Anglo-Saxon.
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AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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