Friday, April 25, 2014

A little bit of family history.

For my last birthday my mum gave me a copy of a local history book of the village where I grew up. It was in the main fascinating and also sad when I learnt that some people I grew up with are no longer alive.

We were talking about the book when I phoned to wish mum a happy Easter and she told me the following story:

The maternal side of my family comes from Great Barr in Birmingham (UK), or thereabouts. The village I grew up in is about 40 miles away which was a long journey in the past. My parents arrived there in the mid-fifties and as far as I know settled in well considering they were outsiders. At first we lived in the village and then moved to farm cottages outside the village.

We have a tradition of finding graveyards fascinating in our family and of course mum did a tour of the church-yard to see if there were any interesting grave stones to read. She came across one that bore the name of her Grandmother’s family – Foden. Yes, this man turned out to have been a distant cousin who had also worked in the village on a farm. When my great-granny (née Foden) visited the cottage after we moved there, she remembered it. Not only had the distant cousin worked on the same farm, he had lived in the same cottage!

What are the chances of that happening?

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