|
|
By Anne, 31 August 2010
 Balta from Unst, Shetland, by Jessie White The painting from which I have taken sections to use as headers is by my great great aunt Jessie, sister of my great grandmother. It is signed J W Crockett – Jessie White Crockett. The small island of Balta lies off Unst across the mouth of Balta Sound in Shetland and when I was there, in 1961, it was populated by puffins.
Jessie Frances Davina White (1848-1907), a doctor’s daughter, was born in Dunfermline, Fife. In 1886 she married Robert Findlay Crockett in London. He was 35 and came from Cluny in Aberdeenshire. They separated soon after their marriage and she spent the rest of her life with my great grandparents. My great grandfather was a Congregational minister.
Her nephew – my grandfather – wrote coyly of the marriage. Robert had become a Congregational minister in the south of England: “He neglected her from the start and within a year was bringing a youth of the congregation to their home.”
Jessie left him, he lost his job and was almost prosecuted but ended up being reinstated. It is not clear what his congregation knew but it would have been shocking enough that his wife had left him, I suspect. My grandfather continues:
“At various times up to 1907 my father received letters from Anglican and Presbyterian authorities asking about Crockett, who was attempting to receive ordination with them. In one instance he saw a Bishop who had enquired and told him he would only discuss the matter in Crockett’s presence; Crockett refused to come, and that was enough for the Bishop. About 1920 Crockett died suddenly.”
We can only imagine how it affected both Robert and Jessie. He spent much of his life in debt – my great grandfather had helped him out when they first married – and unable to pursue the career he had chosen. And she was the deserted wife: “There were times when memories and frustration overwhelmed her and she needed special care.” No wonder!
Not many would judge me nowadays for having attempted marriage twice and failed both times. Things have moved on, thank goodness, from when people lost their jobs because they got divorced and the stigma of illegitimacy has also receded in my lifetime. But things need to move a good deal further because people are still being denied employment because of their sexual orientation as if it were anyone’s business but their own.
Sex is fun – it makes one feel good and does wonders for one’s mental and physical health. Why should it only be allowed within a heterosexual marriage? There are those who overdo it or abuse it, of course (and that can happen within marriage too), but that isn’t a reason to condemn the rest of us who practise it. Even gynaecologists and urologists shy away from suggesting women masturbate when it could aid, if not cure, their period problems and leaky bladders!
I grew up believing in the fairytale that I would meet a man, fall in love and live happily ever after. It didn’t happen and I later discovered that what had appeared to be a fairytale marriage for my parents was, in fact, a submissive, loyal and dutiful wife pretending that she didn’t actually mind her husband’s infidelities. And my two brothers and I have clocked up, so far, 8 marriages and 6 divorces between us. Who knows what caused us to be so “abnormal”?
Yet I know couples personally who have achieved what has proved impossible for me and they have remained true to each other for decades. Some have children and some of those couples are gay.
Men fall for men, women for women – some for both – but how dare anyone say that they must deny themselves sex or a relationship because they are single or happen to fall for the “wrong” gender. Can anyone decide who it is they fancy? It is outwith our control, of course it is, yet the way so many are told they should be celibate for their whole lives you’d think they had a choice.
What really angers me is that what happened in my family in the late 19th century is still happening to others in the early 21st and it is time for the world to grow up and learn the real facts of life. Heartbreakingly, I know this won’t happen in my lifetime but let’s hope that by the 22nd century it will finally have been relegated to where it belongs: in the past.
By Anne, 27 August 2010
The marriage certificate has arrived and yes, my father would have been pleased.
In 1953, a cousin on my paternal grandmother’s side married a woman whose twin brother married into a Somerset family which has direct connections, via London, to my father’s paternal grandmother’s family in Lanarkshire in the early 1800s.
The key is a Frederick Gaylard who, because his wife was around 10 years older than he was, gave a different age for each census return. This makes pinning down which particular Frederick he was, of 3 or 4, very difficult if I don’t want to spend any more money on certificates. But they are all from the Yeovil area.
The most frustrating thing for me is that I cannot make that finite connection on my database – the link must remain unforged for the time being.
I think it is definitely now time for me to go and do something else…
By Anne, 24 August 2010
My website is now littered with adverts but I hope they are marked clearly enough not to be too intrusive. It is all in a good cause, after all!
And I hope no-one will be offended by the Donation button. I know it’s tacky, but visitors often say how much they appreciate the site and it doesn’t exactly run on air.
It’s a good thing I enjoy the challenge of coding web pages. It has been fun setting up side columns on the main pages and fiddling about with how it all looks.
My next job is to get the shop spruced up. It has great potential for expansion but I doubt if the traffic the site generates actually warrants it. But it will be a good mental exercise, even if nothing else comes of it!
My fingers are crossed…
By Anne, 20 August 2010
I usually rely on my subscriptions to genealogy websites to carry out my research and I try to avoid spending extra unless I really have to. But I have just ordered another marriage certificate.
This time I am attempting to track two lines because I rather want them to meet up. If I am successful, I will have been able to link my paternal grandparents – one of whom was Scottish, the other English – up through their ancestors and down again. Not blood lines, of course, but through the sort of connections which I find so satisfying to discover.
Unfortunately, it involves Scotland which might mean more expense but, for the moment, I must sit on my hands until the certificate arrives…
By Anne, 14 August 2010
Because I have over 36,000 individuals on my family tree website, those who find their immediate family there often ask me how they are connected to me.
Sometimes I am unable to answer and today I had to say just that to someone. This is because I go off on tangents and follow obscure leads just because they interest me. All I could tell that person was that she and I are not related, but I doubt if she minds because I had been able to give her some important information about her grandmother.
Meanwhile another person asked me this question today. I answered her thus:
My 2nd cousin 3 times removed
married a man whose 1st cousin once removed
married your great great aunt.
You’d think I’d have left it at that but this person has an unusual married surname. So I did some digging and came up with this:
My 6th cousin twice removed
married the great great aunt of
the wife of your husband’s 3rd cousin.
So I’m connected to both her and her husband and no, we don’t all come from one village, far from it. In fact, thousands of miles are involved and I have yet to hear whether her husband even knows his third cousin!
This is why I’m surprised when people also ask me why I find genealogy so fascinating!
By Anne, 11 August 2010
Still in its infancy, the forum is definitely up and running now. Cousins are already introducing themselves to each other and swapping information.
It could be really useful but the numbers are far too few at the moment so I’m hoping more people will sign up and join in.
I am eternally grateful to my techie, Mark, who deals with all the complicated matters such as setting up the software and dealing with any problems. I have to admit that they are sometimes caused by my having done something stupid but he sorts them out without a murmur – a true gent!
By Anne, 8 August 2010
Finished at last – all my Genes Reunited contacts have had messages about the Gritquoy Forum.
Some of them have already signed up and some are also registering on my website so it was worth it, but it was quite a hard slog!
Mind you, I did stop off to add H G Wells to my tree…
By Anne, 7 August 2010
And still counting!
Yesterday I was able to get down to the business of alerting a lot of my previous contacts about the Gritquoy Forum. And they are now beginning to sign up which is encouraging.
I hadn’t realised quite how many contacts I have made over the years or how long it would take, even copy-pasting, to contact them all. But it’ll be worth it, I think.
A virtual drink is awaiting everyone in the bar…
By Anne, 6 August 2010
The forum needed a plaster yesterday.
I found how to tweak it so that URL links in posts open in a new window and it was working well. And the instructions told me to clear the cache which involves hitting a couple of keys, which I did – I have yet to learn what the cache does exactly, I must admit.
Anyway, although everything looked OK, it turned out that access to the Administration area was blocked so I spent most of the day trying to find what had happened.
In the end, we had to redownload a lot of the code which I then had to tweak again to make all the modifications to its public pages but now, fingers crossed, it will work properly.
As for the URL-opening tweak? Sorry, but I think I’ll leave well alone for the time being, annoying as it is to lose what one has written by testing the link.
So far, we have one long-suffering member and I intend changing that today – it had been my plan for yesterday, of course – by sending a series of emails around my contacts.
Meanwhile, Google has thrown up some interesting statistics about who visits the website and where they come from. Over the last ten days, visitors have hailed from 17 different countries. It rather boggles the mind!
By Anne, 3 August 2010
My new forum is online but I can’t describe it as running yet because I will be enlisting help in these early stages. It’s another completely new venture for me so another steep learning curve because I’ve never even posted on a forum before now.
However, I ‘ve been able to apply my coding skills to the layout and the two columns – one either side – are all my own work. I’m pretty proud of this because it meant stepping into the code and working out where to put things to get it to work.
Now I must sit back and see if anyone joins the forum. The idea is that we discuss the contents of my website thus introducing actual cousins to each other. And there are other family history research matters such as online websites, software, books, etc, which should appeal to a wider audience.
So, who knows where it will lead?
|
|
|
