Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
Ralph Ellison
i am very connected to this land for i have traced my ancestors, within fifty miles from where i now sit, as far back as the 1400's...it was the time of Henry V and the Hundred Year War~Joan of Arc~the War of the Roses...i often wonder who they were, what they looked like, what did they do?
i have no-one rich or famous in my tree, just regular people who led regular lives.
i have agricultural labourers among my Kimber ancestors as well as my Betteridge, Chalk, Lywood and Edsall ancestors, who settled the small villages surrounding Salisbury in Wiltshire, i sometimes wonder if the ancestors of these people helped build Salisbury cathedral?
...there are my Welsh ancestors, miners from Wales who travelled, for reasons unknown, to work the mines in Durham~the mining ending when my grandfather chose the navy over going down the pits every day.
...my Hawkins
Janes, Duke ancestors all connected with the sea~as mariners, bargemen, fishermen. The surname name of my great, great, great, great grandfather Edumund Ormes is intriguing as it is an ancient Scandinavian name and he was a mariner~maybe his ancestors were vikings?
...my Irish ancestors~those who travelled from Southern Ireland, the Gaul's and Byrne's from a small village called Ballykeoghan, Kilkenny~the others, Sullivan and Flahavan from other unknown Irish villages around Waterford, to South Wales to escape the famine, where they settled and worked in the iron industry and the mines of Wales.
My Great Granddad Johney Gaul
lies in France where he died in 1918 a month before his brother-in-law John Betteridge, age 21, who now lies in Rouen
i have to date a single convict, Job Betteridge who was transported for 'arson of an outhouse'~he was transported to Freemantle Australia where he and the other convicts built Freemantle Goal which would house them.
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all of these people, most unknown, many still to be discovered, some stories known and treasured through oral history from those now in the summerland.
hundreds of them~thousands of them~branching back into the mists of time but everyone linked to me through blood~their blood runs in my veins, blood that has seen what we can only know to be pages from history.
