A few weeks ago I bought a flatbed scanner as I thought it would be a good idea to digitise and attempt to restore some old family photos. Eventually, they will find themselves on to a PBase gallery. Only once I started doing the job that I realised that the album featured several relatives that I could not identify. Fortunately my aunt has been proved invaluable here, but my curiosity has been aroused further in this exercise and in order to find out some of the missing information I have just started to research the family tree on my mother’s side of the family.

Today, I received two copy certificates, one relating to my grandmother’s birth and another to her marriage. These have given me further information to work with. A particularly interesting and challenging part of this will be finding out more about my her father (my great-grandfather) as he fled the family home when his children were quite young. I think he ran a bar, but also gambled a great deal.

The old photo shown here shows my grandparents sometime before their marriage, which took place in 1915.