Rain

Rather an obvious writing prompt because if you live in England you expect rain but maybe we don't always realise the devastating effect that rain and a combination of other circumstances can cause.

In October 2000 we had a lot of rain on already saturated land and that combined with strong winds pushing the river upstream and a high tide caused the River Ouse to overflow at Lewes, where I worked in an old building on the wharf, Chandlers Wharf.

I had set off as usual for getting in to work by car, travelling along the by-roads from Haywards Heath to Lewes, via Chailey Common, Chailey and Cooksbridge where I then took the Offham Road passing the Landport Estate, passing The Needlemakers at the top of School Hill and then down to the Town Centre and finally Chandler's Wharf where I could park outside the building.  This particular day though, I got as far as Beveridge Farm between Chailey and Cooksbridge and then found the River Ouse tributary had flooded over the road and it wasn't safe for my small car to go through the water.  Thank goodness I didn't.

I returned home and rang my boss who was working from home in Bexhill and explained and he said to work from home as well.  I didn't have a lot I could do as I seemed to have lost the connection through to work and not surprising.

The centre of Lewes flooded as the river overflowed the banks and the low lying part of Lewes where I worked was under feet of water.  Beer barrels frim Harvey's brewery were floating on the River Ouse, homes were under feet of water and people struggled to get away from their home.  The flooding was made worse by coming through the Cuilfail Tunnel.  Ambulances were floating in the flooding and rescue crews used light inshore rescue boats to get trapped people out of their homes.

Water rose to desk height in our Chandler's Wharf building; smelly dirty water as sewage and water came out of the toilets and mixed with the water coming under doors and through ill fitting windows.  There was going to be no working in the building for days as some staff set about rescuing what could be saved and getting it up to the first floor.  The ground floor had to be emptied and computers, equipment and furniture disposed of.  Meanwhile some poeple were tranferred to other buildings or worked from mobile accommodation that was set up outside the building when the flooding subsided.

I, as part of the Finace Department, was relocated to another Housing Association building in Haywards Heath which was very convenient for me but less so for the rest of the Department.  Our files and computers were brought over and our computer system set up.  We stayed there for several months until the Lewes building was ready to opened as a fully functional office again and we moved back to our upstairs office.  In that office we overlooked the river and took to monitoring the tide level by natural markings on the bricks of the river bank walls as it passed through and under the Cliffe High Street bridge.  It was soon after that that the decision was taken to move further inland in Lewes and slightly uphill too; I wonder why?

Q for Family History topics

 Our March meeting was all about the letter Q.  Members covered various topics including Quarter Sessions, Quakers, an ancestor named Queenie, queries and questions.  My instant first choice was a place  in my research and the the next was an old occupation.

Quetta     My great uncle James White, born 1875 in Kent. died in 1903 in Quetta Balucistan.  Quetta was a garison town in a region close to the border with Afghanistan which was under British control.  He was
a bombadier in the 1st Mountain Battery of the Royal Garison Artillery.

Quassilarius  This is an old occupation for a merchant or pedlar. My great grandfather, Robert Jackson was born 1833 in Kilbarchan Renfrewshire.  His family were hand loom weavers and he stayed in that field until the 1881 census when I found him in the 1881 census with his son as pedlars.  They were in Campbletown, Argyleshire staying with a Catherine Crawford.  Was this a relative as Robert's  mother's  maiden name was Crawford?  He was still a pedlar in 1891 where he was staying in a Model Lodging House in Govan, Lanarkshire and again in 1901 but this time in Mathieson St, Govan together with his son.  I showed a variety of different Scottish documents including Old Parish Registers and a Paternity Decree for Robert and his future wife Helen. This was about the son Robert having been born out of wedlock.

Soap - (Green)

When I was a child in the 1950's we used to have a bar of green soap in a soap dish by the kitchen sink for washing our hands.  It used to get a white deposit on it once it had been used and was drying.  If my memory serves me right it was a bar of Fairy Soap.

For washing woollens, by hand of course, my Mum would use Lux Soap Flakes which were marketed in the 1899 by Lever Bros. and rebranded as Lux Soap Flakes in 1900 .  We also has Lux toilet soap to use for hand and face washing as well but not exclusively.

These were some of the other soaps we would sometimes have:  Cousin's Imperial Leather which was often favoured by men, my father among them; Sunlight Soap which was a yellow bar soap; Wright's Coal Tar soap which was an orangey colour and an antiseptic soap and finally Pears soap which was a translucent honey coloured soap bar that reminded me of my Nan and the soap she used to use.

Sheep

 This writing prompt instantly took me to my father's biological father that he never knowingly had met but had apparently been visited by him when he was very young and living with foster parents.

Frank Grieve Jackson has been mentioned before on my blog here

Born in Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire he had been a Romney Sheep breeder since moving to Kent after World War One.  He is in the 1921 census at Wytherling Court, Molash, Kent which is just 6 miles from Ashford.  He died there in 1947.

He entered many local cattle shows and this newspaper clipping from 1927, which I have only just found; he was a tenant farmer and had a winning entry in the Ashford Cattle Show.

He sold the farm and the farm implements and tackling were sold by auction on the farm in September 1944.

He was 71 when the farm was sold and died 3 years later.

Journeys

Journey No 1.  I have been keeping a document in which I keep the daily writing prompts from Natalie Pithers of Genealogy Stories fame and she can be found on social media site Bluesky.  I have decided to write on this blog weekly using one of her prompts.  This in itself is a new journey for me.  I have tried the #52 ancestors way and fail dismally in keeping up so am now determined that no matter what I will try to keep up with this one...watch this space.

Journey No 2.  Strangely I was only talking about this journey the other evening and this is that golden opportunity to get it down on paper.

We were talking about the Great London smog of 1952 and I remembered a family journey in the late 50's when Dad drove us from Hertfordshire to East Sussex to visit grandparents; least that was the intention.  We had travelled as far as South London but the smog got thicker and thicker until Mum was leaning out of one car window to keep an eye on the kerb and Dad was leaning out of the other window to keep an eye on the white line in the middle of the road.  The car lights faintly glowed in the yellow thick swirling fog and couldn't penetrate enough to see clearly.  It finally reached a point where the strain was too much and Dad decided the best thing to do was to turn round and go home.  I wonder whether my sister and I, as young children,  sensed the tension and kept quiet or whether we weren't helping matters by squbbling or aaking a child's favourite question of "Are we there yet" or "When are we going to be there?"

P is for .......

 A U3A family history group I go to is currently progressing through letters of the alphabet as a topic for their monthly meetings.  We can either talk about some sort of genealogical resource/record/event/location etc or find something from our personal family history to talk about.  

Last month we reached the letter P.  Some very obvious topics sprung to mind but to avoid duplicating what someone else might talk about we often try to find an obscure reference to the letter.  I deliberately ignored the obvious ones of Parish Registers, Poor Houses, Poor Law, Paternity, Proof standards, Probate and Petty sessions, to name but a few and chose a name.  So, what did I choose?

I chose the name Peggy and where it came from.  I found it was a mediaeval variation of Margaret.... Margaret, Meggy/Peggy Maggie/Peggie and Meg/Peg.  It has been used in may cultures and races around the world and has a name day on December 12th in Norway.  With the formal information quickly out the way I moved on to my ancestor called Peggy or Peg.

Peggy or Peg as she was often called, wasn't in fact a Peggy but a Margaret and even then it wasn't her first name of Edith but her second name.  She didn't know who she was named after but her mother didn't like the name and she was given a second name of Margaret her mother insisted she was called Peggy and not Edith or Edie.  I looked a little bit further in her ancestors and found Peggy had an Auntie Edie, her father's sister in law.  Was that the link?  Looking further I found she had a great aunt Edith as well, also on her father's side of the family; was that the link?  The name Peggy was beginning to grow in popularity when she was born in the mid 1920s but it didn't peak until the middle of the next decade whereas the name Edith hd peaked a decade or so earlier and was quickly falling even further.

Margaret?  Did the name have a particular significance to Peggy's mother?  Unfortunately I will never know.  There are several Margaret's amongst Peggy's ancestors, the most likely being her mothers great grandmother, Margaret Ann Hoad who had married Dick Douch Clark who I have blogged about before.  Much more unlikely is her mothers great x5  great aunt, Margaret Christmas back in the 1600's, her great x 6 great grandmother or her great x 6 great uncle's wife.

It made me wonder who I was named after, I will never know!

Twelve

 The blog prompt for today, from a person I follow on Bluesky, was TWELVE.

I quickly went off to my family history database as I new I had some large families amongst my ancestors.  Sure enough I have a few families with twelve or more children.

Today I am going to share about my 2x great father, Richard Douch Clark, who I have posted about before.

He married Margaret Anne Hoad in 1863 in Udimore and this is the list of their children.

Do you have any links to these children or indeed to Dick and Margaret?  I would love to hear from you if you do