Advent Calendar Day 21

We moved away from the Home Counties after our marriage in St Nicholas Church, Harpenden, Herts.  We moved down to the Cotswolds, a lovely part of the country, and both our children were born there.  We first lived in Tetbury where our new build 3 bed semi-detached house cost £8,500.  We relied on overtime and me getting a job to get a mortgage as well as a big deposit because they then only gave 2 1/2 times the man's salary for a morgage.  Peter's salary was just about £1800 pa.  Later we moved to the outskirts of Cirencester when we started a family.

Life evolved round the village school next to the Primary School.  Music and Movement (youngsters dancing), Pram Service, playgroup, school, cubs, brownies, WI etc. It was a well used venue.

Whilst the children were young I went chambermaiding at the local hotel at the bottom of our road and also child minding, which was always in demand as many Mums went to work.  I still keep in touch with one of those Mums.  Peter did evening bingo calling there to supplement our income.

Our holidays were usually spent with our parents and sometimes Peter's parents would tow their caravan somewhere for us to stay.  We started camping first but soon found we didn't really like damp clothes and bedding so bought our own second hand caravan that we kept for several years.  The scariest holiday was in Cornwall at Pentewan during the summer holidays when the Fastnet race was on.  A gale was forecast and we copied others in flinging a rope over the caravan and awning and then drove the car over the rope so that the weight of the car held the roped caravan on the ground to stop it rocking and blowing over.  We didn't sleep that night. The next morning we saw tents ripped to shreds, and overturned caravans and like many others we quickly packed the caravan and hitched it to the car and drove back home.  Not long after that we got rid of the caravan as it began to need a lot of work done on it.

Whilst there we had a golden cocker who was rather temperamental and then rescued a dog from a farm but she wasn't happy being isolated from the other dogs she was with on the farm so we took her back to the rescue centre.  We later rescued a whippet terrier cross who we called Meg.  She was lovely once we got her feeling at home and improved in health and she lived until she was 14.

Meg

We moved to Sussex for Peter's work in 1989 and I took many temporary jobs to help with the increased mortgage costs.  The difference between house prices in Gloucestershire and Sussex was huge.  Amongst those jobs was Lollipop Lady at the local primary school, 6th form college lab technician, moved into their Finance Office and studied for the Association of Accounting Technicians and once I qualified I went to work for a housing association in Lewes that supported people with special needs and health issues.  It was a a rewarding place to work.

I started doing family history in the late 1990s but at the beginning we only had dial up broadband so time spent online was limited so we kept the landline free for phone calls.  We would go online, download emails and go offline, then sit and answer the emails and then go back online to send them. Luckily the East Sussex Archives was in Lewes and I would spend lunch hours and time off in the Archives browsing microfiche to find ancestors.  Also during this time I joined a Rootsweb group called Gentrivia where we discussed trivia about genealogy as well as helping each other.  We also made friends and sometimes met at a physical reunion at different places in England; Derbyshire, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire were some places.  During part of the social chit chat online we invented our home in a village called Trivvington and we all became Trivvies and most people assumed a persona that was woven into stories, but more of that another day.  I remain close friends with some of these people and regularly meet them now.

In 2000 I gave my parents a cross stitch embroidery of our family tree; it took nearly 400 hours of work for the stitching and then there was the research needed to find all the names to go on it.  There were tears all round when they saw it.

You can read a bit more about my family and view the cross stitch tree here.

The children moved away from home for work and their own married lives; one to Hertfordshire, yes full circle again, and the other to Oahu, Hawaii.  Hawaii is certainly the furthest we have been away on holiday and is a beautiful, if somewhat expensive, place to visit.  They now live in Washington State and we have enjoyed holidays there too.

We have been blessed with our 2 children; a son in law, a daughter in law and 5 grandchildren, 3 in England and 2 in America, who all give us so much pleasure.  We don't often get to be altogether at the same time but when we do it is a real mother hen moment for me.

Family History is still my favourite hobby, closely followed by reading, cross stich and knitting and crochet but not necessarily in that order.

I branched out from my family history and created a website for Cuckfield which I am building as a place of local and family history and in August this year I registered it with the Society of One Place Studies and set up its own blog to highlight changes and create more footfall on the site.  Unfortunately the blog has been a little neglected whilst preparing this Advent Calendar!!