There were a few paper mills in Darwen, most set amongst lovely scenery I might add, I believe that they are all closed now 
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Know it very well Nellie, or I used to … 
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All this talk of Mills, got me wondering… I knew a paper mill in Exeter… well, I knew the family who lived there…
Google is my friend … and I learn that the old paper mill is now a Pub-Restaurant and heaven knows what else… Just nice to know the buildings still exist… memories, memories… 
I am the custodian of my family tree and on my mother’s side have gone back to the 1600’s using church records. Being a bit of an obsessive I like to find out as much as I can on every person which has revealed some extraordinary lives but also some unpleasant individuals, in addition it has led to meetings with living relatives that I never knew existed.
If people are interested I will share some of things I’ve found out about a few of the Norfolk Cole’s in my tree.
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Let’s hear something about the Norfolk Coles
Yes please!!!
Great non Brexit post Stella hope we can inspire more like this, and discuss something else less depressing for a bit.
So my family past is quite difficult to explain but here goes. Before the war my maternal grandfather was engaged to a small Geordie lass named Betty and I grew up with her and always knew her as my Grandmother or Grandma as wecalled her. However in the mid eighties this all unravelled when a well kept secret exploded into our lives when I was aged around 13-14 I think. My mum’s Canadian half brother turned up on our doorstep a person none of us knew even existed. And a story of war time infidelity was revealed. So here goes with the detail.
My grandad was engaged to my Geordie Grandma pre war, then went away to war and whilst stationed in Chatham he met a lady and had an affair. He got her pregnant and as a result had to break off his engagement and marry the lady he got pregnant. My mum was born out of this affair, and began the early part of her life in Chatham. My grandad went away to war and his medals indicate he was in Africa, Italy and France for sure. I’ve just applied for his war record to find out what he did. But why he was away his new wife (my mums real mum in Chatham) had an affair (yes there is a pattern here) with a Canadian Airman and got pregnant by him. My grandad returned from war on leave to a heavily pregnant wife that he new he wasn’t the father to as he had been away a long while!
The result was he filed for divorce and as part of the agreement to allow his wife to move to Canada to bring up her new son she had to surrender my mum to his care. Now this is where it becomes even more complicated my grandad moved back home to Dorking his family home. And somehow it came about I’m unclear on how got back together with his previous Geordie love. Who to her immense credit stepped in to bring up my mother as her own daughter. But her only stipulation was that everything associated with my mums mum had to be got rid of clothes, toys everything. My mum was two at the time and has only a very vague memory of this. She gained a half sister 5 years later. And all was hidden and unspoken about until her Canadian half brother turned up on the dootstep in the mid 80’s he sadly had months to live following a terminal cancer diagnosis he wanted to meet his half sister before he died. We think he was hoping to see if my mum would be willing to become his sons legal guardian. But he died three months later and all contact was lost.
My grandad lost three of his 6 brothers during the war so this could be why my Geordie grandma stepped in. But it is a pretty tragic and interesting past for sure.
I post the other side of the family in a separate post
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So my dad’s dad was in the RAF and was ground crew repairing spitfires during the Battle of Britain and kept the Baroda Squadron flying. It was a fleet of spitfires bought and paid for by a maharajah. I have a solid silver mongoose emblem he presented to the airman of the squadron and found this Pathe clip of him talking to the squadron.
Later in the war he was moved to a top secret project working on the first jet aircraft for the RAF
Although he was working on a Top Secret project he managed to take these photos which include pictures of a visit by Montgomery. Which I really cherish.
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Thanks to everyone who has posted so far… what a mixed bag we come from… wonderful stuff…
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If you are just starting to research your family this is a reasonable place to start. It’s free too,
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Whilst my Dads side of the family haven’t moved geographically, they certainly had their moments. The last I heard they had taken the family tree back to the 1730s but couldn’t decide which of three was the way to go. My great grandparents married after son number one was born and when daughter number one was on the way .They went on to have a total of fourteen children in twenty years! All survived to adulthood .However when the eldest was 22 and the youngest 2 he committed suicide, it is believed because the village band of which he was one of the founders didn’t do well in a couple of competitions!
Two of the sons married two sisters from another local family of seven ,one of these couples being my grandparents ,that led to some interesting family dynamics of being your own in laws etc. Another son was widowed young but with children , he married his late wife’s sister . Bizarrely despite my grandparents coming from such large families they only had four children and three of those four only then had one child (me included ) and the other only two
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My first short story is an example of not thinking things through before imparting information to someone who you’ve never met and who also may not want to hear what you’ve got to say, but hey it seemed like a good idea at the time.
A few years back whilst researching my father’s side of my tree I was contacted by someone with the same surname as me asking if I knew an ****** Cole from Norwich who served in Egypt during WW2, I instantly knew who she meant and gave her all the info I had on my great uncle. A few days later she dropped a bombshell - my great uncle was her husband’s father! Now I knew that my great aunt and uncle only had one child so this person was clearly the result of a wartime affair in steamy Cairo (or somewhere less exotic in the desert). I was given photos of my great uncle with a lady along with a birth certificate which had my great uncle down as the father so I was happy that this was all genuine.
To say I was pleased to have unearthed a bit of family scandal was an understatement, before I knew it I was standing at the front door of my great cousin’s house (who I’d had never met before) ready to tell him that he had a half-brother in Essex. Over a cup of coffee and a biscuit I gleefully told him what I found out and expected him to be as excited as me, unfortunately I couldn’t have got it more wrong, he asked me to leave and to never contact him again. After speaking to another member of the family it turned out that my great cousin adored his mother and hated his father, obviously if I had known this I would have done things differently, or would I?
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Oh my word… I think you have won the non-existent prize … with that tale… 
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Your Pathe News clip took me back to the Saturday morning pictures…
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On my mom’s side we are proudly descended from the Scottish highlands…tartan and pipes and crofts and… poverty…
My Great-Gran had 14 children…the girls were put on a one way train to Leicester and Melton in their very early teens and sent into service…they never saw their parents again and my last great aunt died several years ago at 103…
One of my Scottish uncles had traced our family tree prior to the Internet…when he died his daughter not long ago decided to try and continue his quest…she has found out that one of my great gran’s daughters was raped by a local bigwig and my great gran raised the resulting child as her own child…one of her sons was killed in the war and she never got over it…there is a letter from his commander praising his units bravery…(all 6 in the unit were massacred…)
There’s also a letter saying she had come into some money but she was so distrustful of authority…that she didn’t respond…
I don’t know much about my dad’s side…he was born a cockney but they moved away from London when he was still really young…his dad died when I was 7…all I really remember is being told off by his dad all the time when our ball landed in his cabbage patch by mistake and how miserable Sunday dinners were and having to watch the black and white minstrel show…his mom was highly religious and never liked my mom and felt my dad had married beneath him…so didn’t really like me and my sister either…
(My married name I’ve never taken much interest in…the children to my mind were all heavily affected by what their dad experienced during the war…for some reason he loved me but I found his attitude towards his wife (my kids grandma) and his own kids pretty hard to deal with…x )
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as I have said… what a mixed bunch we are… and what interesting tales
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We had a little scandal in that my maternal grandmother had divorced before marrying my maternal grandfather - not common in the 1930’s, especially for “ordinary” folk. It split the family at the time and even in my childhood - 30+ years after I was aware that there was a rift, though not precisely why.
It turns out that there were children by the first marriage and the fact that they were left with their father was the cause of some of the acrimony so I had the surprise of a a cousin in Australia getting in touch out of the blue a couple of years back.
Families eh? 
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Well, my idiot father always claimed descent from Charles Edward Stuart, so I was determined to prove he was wrong I got a paid Ancestry account and started delving. It’s taken over a year, and I now have over 4,500 people in my family tree. so what did I find…
Some of it was hilarious. Imagine having ancestors called Alpen (really fam, really), Lancelot Dowbiggin (I got nothing), George Strange Knockin… Some of it was heartrending, like the ggm from way back who buried 11 of her 12 children before their third birthday (the good old days eh?) and the poor lass who was married at 15 and dead in childbed before she was 20.
Then it got very surreal. I should explain that wherever possible I have used documentation to back up links and cross checked when things looked spurious. I knew that if you managed to get back before 1538, chances are you had nobility, property or money in the family as a lot of records got destroyed then. I started hitting paydirt with surnames, out came the De Montforts (Warwickshire, not Leicester), the de Beauchamps (I want my castle back please), the Stanleys (I’m really sorry for that, double crossing wotsits that they were), a whole line of Irish royalty with improbably long names ( Domhnall Mac-Morrough Kavanagh Koning van Leinster Lord van Ferns - can you imagine calling him in for his tea?), some truly tragic figures (Maude de Braose), Scottish and Welsh royalty (once you find one, you find them all because they all intermarried) but when I hit the surname Beaufort, I knew I’d struck gold, or rather a crown. At that point, I made my tree private as I just didn’t want all and sundry eyeballing it.
Whilst my ancestry is stellar, sadly my bank account is not and being a direct descendent of William the Conquerer unfortunately does not entitle me to a French passport If you are wondering where it all went wrong, here’s how in one word: primogeniture. If you are the 4th or 5th daughter of a noble, you have two fates: the convent or anyone who will take you because your eldest brother inherited the title, lands and money and your elder sisters were married off as necessary so you are ‘unecessary’. So even if you, 4th daughter marry reasonably well, if you then have several children, who have large families, in the end, there is neither money, lands or title left.
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Wow… that is really amazing… and well done for persevering with your research…
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French Connection.
When I was aged 8, we visited my Grandparents in Normandy, Surrey. A Volkswagen stood outside another house belonging to an uncle in the village. Margaret was my mother’s cousin and she had married a Frenchman called Victor. Our visit to them was awkward because only Margaret could translate. My brother and I could not communicate easily with Margaret’s four children.
Nevertheless the ten of us went for a walk on Ash Common, close to MOD land, where the boys scrambled to pick up as many spent cartridges as possible, which filled our parents with apprehension. Later we went back to the house and all the children tried their best to play cards. This occasion, in which we clearly suffered from a language barrier, motivated me to learn French at a later date.
Victor was a pilot in the French Navy, who needed to move with his job and the family settled in Ajaccio, Saint-Cloud, Cherbourg, Casablanca and Toulon amongst others. Margaret suffered a baptism by fire when she arrived in France – she was forbidden to speak in English. Sadly Margaret died in 1981 with cancer at the age of 52.
In 2007 we visited Victor in La Garde, met up with two of his children and later we had letters and photographs from the other two. A copy of the family tree and history was also sent. We do hope to meet up again in the South of France.
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