July 2018

One hundred and forty-three years of information about my family were contained in the Ancestor Chest. That’s the time between the oldest unambiguously dated document it contained (1867) and the year it ceased to act as clearing house for precious but hard-to-file stuff (2010).

During that period, there were ups and downs. The captured episodes most obviously intriguing to posterity were the international adventures: Read more »

April 2018

Using a chest of photos of dead relatives to peer into the recent past was proving insightful. Following my initial one-box, 698-image investigation of the Ancestor Chest, I had a detailed sense of the pictures it contained.
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March 2018

My mother once told me that you’re not a proper adult until both your parents are dead. Thanks, Mum. Could have done without that particular life opinion. Some years later, on Radio 4, someone wise stated that – definitionally – you’re an adult when you stop obsessing about your own life and look-up to the ones around you. Still working on that.  Read more »

March 2017

Following the death our final parent last year, we’ve been investigating and organising their residual possessions. In November, we opened Great Grandfather John Donnelly’s 100-year-old strong box.

Of all the belongings Mum and Dad left us, the most interesting was a chest of photos and documents. These were accumulated across more than a century – stretching back through the old family house at Earlings, the earlier, larger, one at Lufkins, and my maternal grandparent’s previous base in Derbyshire from before 1942.

I was carrying four hemp bags worth of the chest’s contents when I visited cousin Donna in Suffolk, in November. Read more »

My father, Reg Baker, was a dispatch rider for the British Army’s Royal Army Ordinance Corps, in Palestine, between 1946 and 1948.

This was a period of growing violence between elements from within the local Jewish community and British soldiers. These events were part of 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine which evolved into the into the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Read more »