Apart from my GCSE results (which I received on Thursday), this week has been interesting for me as I have taken a sudden interest in family history. I have been looking at some work one of my cousins has done on Ancestry.co.uk – which allows you to build family trees and access census records.
It has certainly made things easier to know who people are when they come up in the conversations we have at family gatherings – and to know who people are when I meet them; earlier this year, for example, I met my second cousins without really knowing who they actually were!
I have found it interesting to put faces to some of the names. Mum and I spent much of Sunday morning looking through some old photos of various family members, that were in a drawer at my grandmother’s house – some of them went quite far back to the late 1800s and early 1900s!
What particularly intreagued me though, was putting a face to two great-uncles which I am named after: Rex was Grandpa’s brother; and Graeme was Granny’s. Interestingly, Rex and Graeme were actually their middle names! I’ve never met either since they both died long before I was born… but its still been interesting to learn about the people who I am named after.
In fact Rex died at sea during the second world war, aboard the HMS Matabele, when it was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat (U-454) in January 1942. The ship was actually only a few miles away from its final destination of Murmansk, in Russia.
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War 2, and many radio and television channels will be commemorating this. One programme which interested me on Sunday night was Channel 4‘s Atlantic Convoys – a documentary about the battle taking place in the Atlantic Ocean which could have lost the war for Britain, between British ships and the German U-boats.
Its actually a 4 part series which continues on Sunday night… watch it if you can, because its quite interesting.
So that rounds off the month of August… start of September tomorrow, so the statistics will be out!
