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I have only been to England twice (plus 2 stop overs for a day). Once in 2005 where I spent a few days in London, flew to Europe, back to Manchester for a couple days work, a train to Heathrow and back home. The second time in January 09 was supposed to be almost the same. A couple days sight seeing in London, up to Manchester for work and then onto Germany and then home.
On the day before I left my boss changed the venue for the Manchester meeting to Kent. Because of the location of the meeting out in the sticks somewhere near Tonbridge I hired a car and motored down the day before.
This was before I started tracing my family history but I knew my grandparents came from Kent, I had no details but had heard a couple place names (Tonbridge, Tonbridge Wells, Dartford). I got to the area much earlier than I expected (your island isn't very big) so I was just driving around looking at the scenery, using up time and trying to find a castle to look at. I ended up at Scotney Castle but it was closed. On the way back to Tonbridge I decided to turn off the main road and onto a much smaller road, for absolutely no reason. I just did and I can still remember turning off and thinking to myself "Lets see what is down this road?". I drove a couple of miles down that road and ended up in a small little village. I parked the car, strolled around the church graveyard taking some photographs and trying to read the names and dates on the headstones. Then I had lunch at the pub next door, went no further and returned to Tonbridge.
When I got home I kept thinking about this village and how relaxed life seemed there and told a couple of friends about it and the +/- 300 year old headstones and that was the kind of place I would like to live in.
Once or twice I have tried to find the village on Google maps/earth taking the route back from Scotney Castle but never found the village.
Yesterday I went through all my "hot matches" on GR and found a couple that were also from Kent and was trying to see if any of my relatives were from the same districts. One of them was from the same area as Scotney Castle. I pulled out my slip for lunch at the little village (I have to keep these things for tax purposes) and got the name of the pub and town using Google.
I then checked my family tree workings and found that there are 3 generations of 2 families in my acestory that were born in this very same village plus some others in the surrounding area.
Why was my meeting changed to Kent ???
Why did I go down there a day earlier than I had to ???
Why did I drive past Tonbridge for no reason and take that side road to Goudhurst ???
Were any of the headstones in the churchyard those of my ggg grandparents ????
Why did I keep talking about the little village and churchyard in Kent for months afterwards ???
Do I want to go back to Goudhurst and have a proper look....ABSOLUTELY.
Sorry about the long story and thank you Google, the taxman and GR,
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Glenn, this is not such an uncommon experience as one might imagin. I have read and experienced same. They say that many people unknowingly visit or have feelings for a place without knowing ancestors came from there. My husband and I have been visiting Cornwall for last 34 yrs.(we both come from London) twice nearly moved there. Through family research it turns out in 1760 both are ancestors lived only 3 miles apart, fate or what.
Carol
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On a trip to the UK from Australia I had a list of places I wanted to see. We went to one village and I asked my OH if he felt an affinity with it as some of his ancestors came from there. He said no - he thought the village was very nice but he didn't feel a connection. However I did. It felt comfortable and almost familiar.
When we went home I looked up the area and found I'd made a mistake. It wasn't OH's ancestors that came from the village - it was mine.
Glenn I enjoyed reading your experience.
Sue xx
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Hello Glenn, I have no idea but I did enjoy reading that with my morning coffee.
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The other thing that happened on the same trip was that I was spending the weekend with a friend in Leicestershire after I had been to Manchester.
His wife suggested they take me to Chatsworth House/Hall for a visit and lunch, it's not really my kind of idea of a day out but in the end we decided to rather go to the F1 museum at Donnington race track. Last weekend my dad (the otherside of the family to those in Kent) tells me that his grandfather or great grandfather worked on the estate at Chatsworth House. Now I wished we had rather have gone there.
Our African people in South Africa have very strong traditions and beliefs regarding their ancestors. Maybe they have been right all along and the joke is on me.
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It's a lovely story, Glenn. Longer the better, for me. ;)
But don't forget -- their island isn't very big. ;)
As a grandchild of emigrants myself, one couple having met after coming to Canada as children (their own parents being from several different regions of England) and the other having married first in England but being from very different areas, I'd be hard pressed to throw a stone anywhere south of Manchester and not hit a village some ancestor of mine had done something in!
(Just to add -- in Kent alone, and only back to a couple of years before 1800, I have Sittingbourne, Faversham, Selling, Blean, Canterbury ...)
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Lovely story Glenn.
And Janey, I live just a few miles from your Kent ancestors - let me know if you need photos ...
Jill
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Oooh, Ms.G, that is one set of ancestors in which I have been in tremendous luck.
I'd stuck notes around the censuses for various of them, and I was contacted, oh, 3-4 years ago by someone related. Turns out she lives in Canterbury, entirely coincidentally. She had found someone in one of her census households identified as "aunt" and had no idea who she was. She tracked her back -- and back farther into parish records, since she's right there where they are. And she discovered that our mutual greatx4 grandmother had two husbands, me descended from the first and her descended from the second.
So she's given me piles of stuff. I think it was that "aunt" who once owned land by the cathedral, and refused to allow an archaelogical dig there in the late 19th century because she had had a stone wall for her cattle built right across where they wanted to dig. ;)
And she's also the one who discovered that our mutual grx4 grandmother's brother was the grandfather of the Viscount Sankey who wrote Rumpole's favourite line -- "The Golden Thread that runs through the English Law" (the presumption of innocence) -- when he was a Lord Justice. What she didn't know, and I was both thrilled and red-faced to find out as soon as I googled, was that he was also Lord Chancellor of England c1929, and that year wrote the decision in the case that held that women in Canada are "persons" for the purpose of appointment to the Senate, and that our constitution is a "living tree" and must be interpreted with the times -- one of the most important decisions in our constitutional history. One of the women who took the "persons case" all the way to the Privy Council in London was, of course, the author of the Janey Canuck series of books!
It's a tale oft-told here, I know, but I get a kick out of it still. I just wish I'd known about it when I was in law school. How I could have dined out on being the second cousin four times removed of Sankey L.J. ;)
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