Family History Reseach

I have a large and wide spread family and along with most people I have many family stories to tell.

I have thought long and hard about the stories that could adapt themselves to this project and have laid out three possibility.

1. I thought about my father who in 1956 boarded a ship in bombay to come to England for the first time having been born and raised in India. His father was originally from Islington  North London and had gone to india in 1921 with the army. My grandfather felt that it was time for the family to move to England and had sent his youngest son ahead to find some were for them to live. I wanted to plot his journey from Bombay via the Suez cannel to England and the streets of 1950's Brighton, highlighting the different world he was about to discover.

   

   My Grand Father William Barrett and the ship my father traveled to England in.

   
   
2. My grandmother on my mothers side always told us stories from WW2.  One of the most vivid was, after working late one night at 'The Regent' a cinema and dance hall in Brighton. Where she ran the Bar with her sister.  She returned home to find my aunt and my mother where a sleep in their beds,  she and my great grandmother carried them down stairs and put them to sleep in the air raid shelter my great grandfather had build in the basement. In the early hours of the morning a bomb dropped in the middle of the street. The force of the explosion blew out all of the windows in the front of the house. If my aunt and mother had remained in their beds they would have been killed by the flying glass and debris.

   

   News paper article about the bomb. My Great grandparents with my mother and aunt after the windows had been repaired.

   
   
3. I have just spent the last summer moving out of my grandparent house and during this process I have unearth some writing from my great grandfather on my mothers side. As a child I lived in a house with my mother and my brother and both my great grandparents I remember him well but never got on with him so I knew nothing of his back ground. Reading through his writing opened a window on a world I never knew. His name was James Hunt, he was born in Manchester and work all his life in the building trade as a brick layer. He talks about his early life and how he would do any thing to get work. The strongest story is of him walking 8 miles to a new mine to try and get work as a brick layer building the shaft and the working conditions he found.

   

   Walter and James Hunt and Jame's writing.