Just pleasantly floundering around.....

I have always loved this photo as a little window into my ancestry. The chap on the right, back row, is my grandad (George Potter born 1892). He looks a fair bit like my dad did and my sister. He was born in Plaistow and by all accounts was quite a character. I have a couple of poems that he wrote and they are very humorous. He died when I was four and my only memory of him is of him handing me some chalk to scribble on the end of his sideboard. He died shortly after the last of his thirteen grand-children (my brother) was born. My father took my baby brother into hospital to show him his new grandchild but apparently my dad was ushered out by a nurse saying, 'this is no place for babies.' I don't know much about my grandad. I do know he fought in the Battle of the Somme. A couple of times my dad descrbed how he had a hole in his leg. There was always speculation about whether or not it was a Blighty wound. How sensible of him if it was. He married my grandmother long after...

My dad shared very few memories with me of his younger days so I could hardly write a biography. What he did share, however, was usually very funny, tragic or interesting... ********************** My dad was the fourth child of five. His older brother, George (first-born) was nearly nine years older than him - old enough to have fought in the second world war and have a uniform so he only looked up to him with admiration. His younger sister he also adored. However sisters number two and three gave him a lifetime's scar. The story goes that my dad was about four when he was trying to get into his sister's bedroom. They were not going to let their irritating little brother in so they slammed the door on his face - so hard, his nose was completely broken. This left him with a 'nose' that in effect was completely flat until you came to the nostrils. He had this 'deformity' until at the age of twenty one, when he had his nose reconstructed using a piece of bone from ...

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine offered to investigate and map out my family tree for me. I jumped at her offer - not sure what pleasure exactly I would receive from her doing so, but thought it would be interesting in the least. I had not realised how I would actually become a little obsessed by one member of my family tree: my mother's father's father's mother or one of my great, great grandmothers: Maria Ward. The first general point of interest for me was that although I had been brought up near Gatwick and had knowledge of most of my family coming from south and east London, I did not realise there was a substantial sprinkling of Norfolk - found in three independent branches of my tree. I came to Norfolk to go to university and stayed, totally unaware of any local family history. When your ancestry is a few miles down the road, it's far easier to investigate, explore and get a bit excited about. It turned out Maria Ward lived about fifteen miles from Norwic...