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Glen TK
23-05-13, 18:00
I'm not sure what it is with me but I'm finding more and more occassions where I have walked in the footsteps of long gone family without knowing it.

Long before I started my tree I was in the lorry in Norfolk, passed a cemetery and decided to stop by it on the way back to have my break, I ended up wandering in and heading to a group of headstones and for some reason, one that was laid flat seemd interesting. I cleared the grass and detritus from it and read what little was legible, it meant nothing to me but several years later I discover it was the grave of my 2xgrt grandfather.

That same ancestor also lived in Berwick for a time, I lived near there and used to go shopping there quite frequently, one shop used to give me a strange feeling, like someone was watching me from inside but the display shelves covered the view in and out, low and behold it used to be where he lived.

I was born in Lincoln, worked there for a while but never lived there and knew nothing of the family, it turns out I was working just 30 yards from where a set of great grandparents lived and in the exact spot where an uncle used to have a barbers shop 40 years earlier.

Then I worked in Worksop and have just found the site of the building is just 100 yards from where relatives lived in the 1870's and they would have walked down an old pathway right by the building to the colliery, it's also the town where my birth father died long before I knew who he was.

Another strange surrounds a Goulson relative who lived in Gainsborough very briefly in the early 1900's. I' ended up buying the house he lived in, he then went to Sheffield and lived in Attercliffe Common, I did some research into where the houses where and it's now a retail park, strange thing is I worked in a shop on that same retail park when it was first built.

I just can't keep away from them and it's not like I was hunting for them back in the 1990's.

Rusty
23-05-13, 18:24
I too seem to have dogged the footsteps of one branch of my family, the Bradfields were shoemakers from Brixham, they moved to Bristol and then to Newcastle upon Tyne where I was born. I moved south to a small village near Somerton (Somerset) and eventually went to work for Clarks Shoes, admittedly I didn't make shoes but it was quite a weird feeling following in my ancestors footsteps like that.

Margaret.

Glen TK
23-05-13, 18:44
I've delivered a few thousand pairs of shoes to Clarks over the years after they pulled out of producing here in the UK.

Rusty
23-05-13, 18:51
I've delivered a few thousand pairs of shoes to Clarks over the years after they pulled out of producing here in the UK.

It was so sad watching factory after factory, then department after department closing down to be replaced by the Village, we all sat there watching it happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. My husband worked in Woodsgate until it closed, now they've got a huge ugly building, a real blot on the landscape!

marquette
26-05-13, 22:52
I have been just updating far-flung parts of my tree with the 1911 census etc. Not that I can follow in their footsteps, but I just found two third cousins twice removed, one born on my birthday, 58 years before me and her sister was born on the same day as my mum, 34 years earlier (baptism records are now on ancestry).

There is also a cousin on my husbands side who was born 100years to the day before me.

Recently when I was trawling through Trove for snippets on other family members, so many things seem to have happened in July, the month of my birth.

Sometimes I wonder why I am interested in a particular person, for no apparent reason, and on further research, they were born or died close to my birthday.

Its very weird and sometimes gives me goosebumps.

Di