Category: Living Conditions
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No beating about the Bush Dreadful conditions, a strong community in Cwm Clydach
The Cutlock & Co articles on Bush Houses are some of the most popular on the website. As the latest batch of old news uploaded to the Welsh Newspapers Online archive includes nine year’s worth of the Rhondda Leader from the start of the 20th century, a quick trawl seemed a good idea. Forty items…
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Exploring family history on a Kindle
A couple of self-published family history tales available on Amazon’s Kindle have come my way recently (via Facebook). Oh, aren’t I up with the trendy stuff. These prompted me to think about how such e-book devices make it easy for genealogy folk to release stories based on their researches for a wider public, at low…
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The London smog of 1952
6th December 1952 – the day my paternal grandfather Sydney Charles Howes died after cycling from his teaching job in Nunhead to home in New Cross. Smog related death not long before he was due to retire and the reason I never met him. (6th December was the height of the smog.) Originally from a…
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Booth’s London survey south of the river
Last night’s Who Do You Think You Are? kicked off with Len Goodman checking out his Bethnal Green roots, and the area’s living conditions through Booth’s survey into life and labour in London (1886-1903). I’ve had the start of a short item on Booth’s survey lurking here for months, so a good time to get…
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Feeling Bushed Exploring Bush Houses, Clydach Vale
It is a couple of years since I first stumbled across Bush Houses as the place where my coal mining ancestors lived on moving to the Welsh valleys. I can still remember the confusion of trying to work out quite where Bush Houses was (were?). From the 1891 census for the Osborne family I could…
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Oak River sledge ride to school A little snow in Manitoba
Posted earlier on Ancestry message board for Manitoba, and now updated with scans of photos: An old family photo album came out for the first time (for me anyway) this Christmas, with a few snaps from our Neal relatives who had emigrated to Manitoba. Bob, Harry?, Stan, Nellie One photo was labelled ‘School-van Oak River’…