I focused once more on my genealogy, for my Forest of Dean people, the presentation I'd already worked on for them delighting me. The Forest calls to me, to see the places I never went to previously, like the red ochre caves of Clearwell, mined by the ancients of the Forest and associated with my own ancestors. Despite the locals having been treated as 'squatters', frequently being evicted from the Forest, I just know they were anciently of the land, because my archeogenetic dna has considerable tribalism connected to this area. So what more was I finding out about my Forest of Dean ancestors. Specifically I focused on my Foxes, Aston's and Dobbs. John Aston, one of my ancestors, was a 'squarrer', and I know not what that was, and as was indicated in the 1851 census he was also blind, and it was by looking in old newspapers for any information about him that I found out why. Back in 1830, on a summers day in July, John and a work colleague, Thomas Phipps, were preparing to blast part of a rock near Coleford. Thomas was holding a bag of gunpowder for the job, equalling 3lbs of the explosive, while smoking on his pipe, oh dear, and a spark from that pipe fell among the powder, which exploded, throwing the men to a distance of several yards. Naturally they were severely injured and although they recovered well they were left blind. Not John's error then, but rather the carelessness of his friend. As for John's wife, Elizabeth Smith, I'd not sussed her ancestors before, but now was discovering them, three generations of Henry Smith's of Newland, with their wives Jane Evans, Susannah and Anna. Continuing with this genealogy a day or so later, I was looking at the plague, which my ancestor Benjamin Aston died from back in 1613. Plagues, they were many since the 1300's, and were far more deadly than our covid pandemic, for which many of our ancestors would have sickened from this. Obviously some were survivors, for which we are thankfully here now. Recent research has shown that a genetic mutation helped our people to survive, one for which we'd since had to cope with autoimmune diseases or at the very least over-active immune systems. Likely this mutation helped with covid too, but anyway could also explain why I have so many sensitivities to foods and smells; at last something to make sense of it all; my wonderful plague survivors. Benjamin, born in 1563, and his father John Aston, his sister and brothers, lived at Whitecliff, and its interesting that the surname Aston was given to people who lived at rocks or by ash trees, as Whitecliff was indeed a place of a rock cliff. In my imagination I see them even further back as cave dwellers; that does appeal to me. Far enough back it is so that we were all cave dwellers. Back to my genealogy, I was marking on a map areas of the Forest of Dean associated with my ancestors. And as for those Smiths I was descended from, in accordance with such a surname they were likely of the original metal working communities thereabouts. One such ancient blacksmith community even got a mention from the Romans, being at Ariconium and many coins and fibula brooches, which they likely fashioned, were still being found by treasure seekers, as well as a dancing goddess figurine made from brass and found in one of the old cinder piles. One of Britains oldest fibula brooches found as yet came from a ditch near Cirencester, upon which was a snake design, a face and those spirals I love. Again I absorbed myself in my Forest of Dean genealogy, finding some remarriages I'd not noted before and finding out that these ancestors of mine were freeminers, that is locals, born of the Forest, being aged over 21, and having worked a year and a day already in the forest mines; now by rights (from time immemorial) permitted to dig anywhere their own 'gales' by which to mine for coal, iron and rocks. I worked on a write-up on my site about my Aston's, Dobb's and Foxes of the Forest of Dean, my people of the forests, which started off quite patchy, as I researched more and more, but slowly began to flow and become an interesting read. In 1846, just as in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, and indeed in much of Northern Europe, the potato crops failed, the people having forsaken their traditional diversity of foods for the foreign potatoes that used less land while feeding more people. For such reliance on one food the blight upon the potatoes was disastrous. And yet the foresters coped well at such a time, because they were capable foragers of all that the forest naturally yielded, such as chestnuts, crab apples and blackberries, a tradition my family continued with and which still I did to this day, all those chestnuts we'd roasted and the gathering of blackberries for bramble jelly. Even as a child I remember collecting winberries in the Welsh hills. Always testing times would now and again arise, like in 1814, in the Forest, when there was a plague of mice. All attempts to eradicate the mice, with cats, traps and poisons, made little impact, until one of the freeminers, named Simmons, pointed out that the mice died when they fell into the wells and pits, for not being able to get back out again. Hence, now, many holes, two feet deep, were dug, and the mice fell into them in great numbers. Simmons and the other men were paid for the amount of 'tails' they brought from those pits, amounting in all to 100,000 perished mice. In 1795 the Foresters rioted, women and children joining in, in what were known as the Bread Riots. There had always been an honourable exchange between foresters and farmers of the surrounding pastures, fuel from the forest in return for flour for bread. This was disrupted when Britain, as a nation, engaged in wars against revolutionary France, with our government redirecting that corn into feeding the army and navy. For which, in consequence, the foresters, in need of their daily bread, took to raiding passing carts of corn, forcefully taking the food to be divided among their own people. The authorities sent in the calvary to stop their interests being sabotaged. And again, when boats were transporting corn along the river Severn, the locals raided them too, and again the calvary was sent in and the ringleaders caught and executed. It was thereafter, at last, taken heed of by the authorities that they had put these people into a state of famine and that they must therefore help them, for which the Crown acquiesced and distributed £1,000 worth of grain to the poor distressed locals.
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At market, one Texan enthusiast of our French mysteries hereabouts was saying to others that the local language of Occitan was from Aramaic, the 'pure language of Jesus'. Actually though, as I interjected, Occitan has Latin origins. I expanded into my late thoughts that there was an original language here before Occitan, far more ancient, because as I have seen it the local goddess of Bugarach, Noor, is not an Occitan word. It occurred to me that the most ancient language here would have aligned with cave dwelling and the standing stones and would more have resembled Basque, which in itself has always been mysterious. Yes, I know it, that Noor also means in Arabic 'light', as one of the men remarked on, but likely this was also an ancient local word. I did look more into this once back home. And yes, Occitan was a language introduced by the Romans, and therefore this had covered what was in existence before. And as for that old language having more resembled Basque, indeed, on my looking into this it was understood by linguists and historians that the language spoken by cave people, as I had myself deduced, would have been a proto-Basque, there being evidence dating this back to the Neolithic times and even beyond. Basque words alike to Noor, as I now saw, written as 'nur' translated to 'water' and also to 'hazelnuts'. A water goddess them, maybe, for the magical springs and rivers of this sacred landscape. Basque, also known as Euskara, was unique and always somewhat of a mystery. I had traces of Basque dna, as did my mother, which may well be in us from way back in Palaeolithic times, when the Welsh, Irish and Scots were of the same family groups as those of the Basque, and likewise with ancient Sardinians, also dna I carried. All was so very interesting.
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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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