It was time to leave England and take the train to Paris…
I still miss cousin Dot’s house in the English countryside and the little garden.
I miss the quiet little street with the brick houses, and the little day care center around the corner full of adorable little kids all yelling with their adorable little accents.
I felt like I got to know the real England, at least a little bit.
On the last night there, after we returned from our Liverpool adventure, Mollie, my wife, my mom and cousin Dot, got out all of Dot’s photo albums. Mom and Dot talked for hours about our family history. They looked at pictures, and talked about the people in them. Mollie hand-wrote a family tree. I know I am adopted, but this is the only family I have ever known. This is my history.
Hey look, it is that same headstone we visited on our first day in Leyland.
And that lady in the middle, the one with the red arrow pointing at her… (don’t worry, I used Photoshop, I didn’t actually draw on a photo with a red marker)… that is Grandma Nellie, my dad’s mother. I guess this was taken when she was visiting the family in England. It is hard to tell when this was taken. She lived to be 98, and she sort of looked old even when I was a little kid. By this point in the family history, I was snoring in one of Dot’s cozy chairs… hey, it had been a long day… but look at the guys in the back row… see those ears? Those are the Browne ears… except these people all still have the Browne without the ‘e’ on the end… no… I am not explaining it again… did you read the earlier posts?
The next morning we left for Paris.
Pouring My Art Out 
The garden, the sepia, lovely
yay
I actually thought about you quite a few times while in England, wishing we could have met.
Thanks for sharing the pics! What fun!
yay
Those pictures are great. And as the mom of an adopted kid, you’re right. That IS your family. And they wanted it that way, even before they knew how much fun you’d be.
Right, it just sometimes feels weird to not be related by blood to anybody I know.
Your kids. Consider yourself Adam!
hmmmm……. that sort of works.
Recently I did the Ancestry.com DNA test for ethnicity which will (if you want) show you your ethnic genetic makeup and also other people who are related to you who have taken the test. I found a couple of second and third cousins that way whom I didn’t know I had and found out some interesting family history from one of them. I was also contacted by a woman who, according to the test, is a second cousin but she was adopted as a child and knows nothing of her biological family. She was hoping I would know more about who her father was since she only had the name of her birth mother. Unfortunately, my family had moved from that state to California when my dad was about two years old, so I couldn’t help her. Have you ever thought about doing something like this, even if only for discovering your ethnic background? Maybe you’re English too!
I thought of trying to find the names of my birth parents, but California in the 60’s was very protective of that. The DNA thing sounds kind of fun. I might check that out. Thanks.
I think it’s less than a hundred bucks now for the test and it’s very easy to do. They send you a kit where you spit in tube, put the top on that releases a stabilizing liquid, shake it up and send it back. I got my results in about three weeks. Then you go to the Ancestry DNA website to register and they have several very informative pages about your ethnicity percentages, how they determined them, etc. You can click on DNA matches to see other people who share your DNA. I found out that my Norwegian great-grandparents were actually ethnic Finns, so I researched that and found out really interesting things about how that came about. It’s worth a try, I think. Good luck!
I could do that… I have plenty of spit… not a lot of money… but hey…
Wow, they are some old pictures. And some of the people in the pictures are old – which is ,like, old squared. I would guess some of the pics were from the early 1900’s and some of the elderly ladies were at least 70 or older – that would make the older ladies in the pictures born around 1830 or so. Love the picture of the old lawnmower.
It is sad when we have to move on after visiting new places and making new friends.
Life is a journey… a flowing river.
Awwww, it’s fun to climb around in the family tree isn’t it?
I swing from the branches
Nothing wrong with monkeying around a bit
Especially if you wrote and illustrated a children’s book called; I like monkeys.
True, … I haven’t written any children’s stories since my kiddos were tiny. Andddd that’s probably a good thing. 🙂
you could try it and see
Maybe someday, not today.
ok