Once upon a time, in deepest Lancashire, a young Red Cross nurse met a wounded young soldier and, a few years later, dear reader, she married him.
OK, so he wasn't so much "wounded" as suffering from malaria, which he contracted during his Great War service in India, but the rest is true. Ashton-under-Lyne, convalescent hospital . . . Dora Blackshaw, born today in 1893, married Freeman Langford in 1920; they raised two daughters and remained together until his death in 1971. Dora died in 1977 and her daughter, who sadly died last year, told me the story.
From up north to Biggleswade for Winifred Alice Bygrave, born in 1904, and on again to Cambs for Maria Young, born in early 1851 in Chatteris. My most up to date "sighting" of the latter was in the 1871 census when she's working in the fields as an ag lab, so plenty of scope for more research there!
Quite a lean day for anniversaries (oh, except - Happy Birthday Paul) but again, it's a useful exercise in finding the gaps. The information available online is so much better than when I started hunting ancestors, particularly when one has a subscription to one of the major sites (http://www.ancestry.co.uk).
And it gives me a good excuse to stay inside when it snows . . . . again! That's not to say that I stayed in today; I had to go out while it was snowing (most of the day) but I was pleased to get home and seize up from the unexpected exercise - it was a choice of waiting for a bus and getting cold, or walking and keeping warm.
And the weather people are predicting minus umpteen degrees C tonight so I may have a good excuse for tomorrow!!
Onwards . . . . .
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