A trip to a concert and an ancestor hunt in The View from the Terrace

On Friday we went to a concert in Stroud. It was Chris Bannister, one of our John Denver friends who does tributes, well not exactly tributes as he performs the music in his own style and also does the odd song of his own. He is very talented and we had a great evening.

Stroud is also the area when one branch of my family originate from. My great great grandparents Thomas and Mary Ann lived in nearby King’s Stanley. They left about 1845. He took a job helping to build the Great Western Railway. During the following 10 years they moved 5 times before settling in Wolverhampton. He was a carpenter by trade but later worked as an inspector on the trains.

They had 11 children, 3 before leaving King’s Stanley, one in each of the places they moved to and the last 4 in Wolverhampton. Only 5 lived to adulthood and one of those died at 19. I can’t imagine what life must have been like then. To leave your home and family with 3 little ones, to give birth to another baby and to bury one and then move on all in 2 years, and then the same thing to happen in the next town. I found the burial records for 3 little ones that died in Wolverhampton, a baby and a toddler lost to smallpox and a little three and half year old from a scalding accident. Thomas died aged 48 leaving Mary Ann to raise her remaning brood of 5 aged beween 2 and 18 alone. She lived to be 72. My grandfather, her grandson would have been 13 at the time. How I wish I had asked him about her but when I was young my interest in family history hadn’t really been kindled.

We drove over early on Friday so that we could have a look round King’s Stanley. I have been there once before but it was pouring with rain then and, would you believe, it rained again on Friday. I did have a walk around the churchyard but it was too dark and dreary to read the old gravestones. The church was locked. I would have loved to have gone inside to see where my ancetors were baptised and married. It is an odd thought that if Thomas and Mary Ann hadn’t married I wouldn’t be here today. From the church I could see the old mill where so many of them worked. It was saved from demolition a few years back and is now luxury flats, times have changed.