07:45 An early morning text from my sister Gill in Cambridge. Both Gill and I, and also my wife Lois, are researching online into our "new" cousin, David the online journalist, the cousin we didn't know we had until Gill took a DNA test.
Peter was married to a woman called Elizabeth in the late 1940's, and he was obviously sleeping with both women during this period - because both his wife Elizabeth and our Aunty Joan each gave birth to a child by him in 1949, which must have been awkward, to put it mildly.
The trouble with this kind of research is that it's a bit like a drug, and you want to just keep finding out more and more about the people you come across, whether it's information that's wanted or not. It's just interesting in its own right, in a way, but it's possible to take it too far, that's for sure!
It's genealogical madness, I tell you !!!!!!
I don't know what it must have been like for Meg McCubbin growing up with stepdad naturalist Chris Packham with his obsessive-autistic character traits, but I guess she's got used to him over the years. It does seem to have made her seem quite a lot younger than her actual age, however, when she's in his presence - she seems like a teenager but she's actually in her late-20's.
Gill has discovered that Elizabeth, Peter's future wife, in her early years, in the late 1910's and early 1920's, lived in Sarawak in the northern part of Borneo, a province that was part of the British Empire in those far-off imperial days - it's now part of Malaysia I think.
Sarawak, a province which was run by the British explorer
James Brooke and his family (the so-called "White Rajahs") for just over
100 years from 1839 - what a crazy world this was, in those far-off days!
In 1923, however, Elizabeth's father, a British engineer, for some reason decided to bring his 8-year-old daughter Elizabeth and her younger sister, back to the UK. Perhaps Elizabeth's mother had died out there? The three of them came back on the P&O ship "Nankin", en route from Yokohama to London, stopping at Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore (where the family boarded), and Bombay.
the official record of the SS Nankin arriving in London in 1923 with a list of passengers
including Elizabeth, her father and her little sister.
At least initially, the three of them lived at an address in Chelsea, London, owned, we think, by an aunt of Elizabeth's, which makes sense as a first haven to make for.
the first house on the left is the house the family moved to initially
after arriving back in England from Sarawak in 1923 - looks nice !!!!
For instance, I find out this afternoon that the P&O ship, the SS Nankin, which the family travelled home to England in in 1923, was later captured by the German Navy in 1942, when en route from Melbourne to Bombay. The Germans took it to Japan, where it got blown up inadvertently in a tanker accident later the same year.
I tell myself to stop doing any more research on all this, for now at least.
the P&O liner, the SS Nankin,
blown up "by mistake" in 1942 - oops!!!
Enough!
10:30 It's going to rain heavily tomorrow, so Lois says we must pick apples from the eating-apple tree this morning, at least getting the ones that look ready to pick, or ready-ish / reddish.
the fruit we harvest today - easily identifiable as apples, even by me!
I make 2 cups of coffee and sit down on the patio, but Lois is
down the garden again doing some other harvesting
Lois harvests some more green beans and
the last of the beetroot
at last - a chance to relax with some coffee
later we have lunch: egg sandwiches and
our own home-grown tomatoes and cucumber
17:00 I feel I can stop researching about Elizabeth and her family now but Lois won't let it go just yet. It's madness !!!!!
Elizabeth's father was called John, and he must have married, or at least gone to bed with, a native woman when he was out there working as a mining engineer in Sarawak, that is, she must have been a native woman just judging by her name: Poing-Ah-Lian - doesn't sound very English to me haha!
19:00 All thoughts of having dinner are forgotten, as the research goes on! Lois is like a tiger when she gets hold of some juicy morsel of historical research.
I have to hastily amend the rightmost end of my hastily-scribbled family tree sketch to include the Sarawakian component.
John must have left Poing-Ah-Lian in Sarawak when he brought their children back to England in 1923 - or maybe she had died, who knows.
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in Chris Packham and stepdaughter Megan McCubbin's new series "Chris and Meg's Wild Summer".
In the car, Chris asks Meg what she thinks of when she thinks of England's Lake District. Lake Windermere, she replies, or maybe children's author Beatrix Potter.
What nonsense !!!
In his youth, Chris was apparently the sort of boy who learns thousands of facts about things and reels them off given half a chance. Thank goodness I wasn't like that! [That's not what I've heard! - Ed]
Who knew that alpacas hum when they're happy. Also that they are particularly happy when they're peeing: and so they take a long time over it - alpacas can stand peeing for up to 8 minutes at a time. What madness !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!
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