Pollyana

I thought Covid had destroyed all my plans, and it certainly threw the financial planning into chaos, but as you say, some things are more important than money, hence I'm going as son as I realistically can, even though I'm surrounded by people pointing out it doesn't make financial sense &its a bad time to move. The other thing they say to me almost daily is that 'ÿou're only a 24 hour flight away" - my retort to that is that they have short memories as our office was heavily involved in border closures and quarantine arrangements. Nothing to stop it happening again.
Life is too short.

Thank you

brits1

I have known many many people who stayed in their adopted countries for financial reasons and while a small few were okay with their decision but the majority are not happy despite money in the bank, large homes etc I hope you have a fab time upon your return “home” and remember “money really cannot buy you happiness” x

Gordon Barlow

Sometimes, what expats miss is not so much the country they were born and grew up in, as their home towns. I was an Australian expat overseas, but have morphed into a British expat. Home is where I live, but if I ever had to choose between Australia and Britain, I would choose - not Britain as such, but a specific area of Britain. My new home would be a specific place, and that place would be in the neighbourhood of Bath, in Somerset. (Yes, yes, I know... but we colonials of a certain age don't recognise the "new" counties! "Avon"? That's some kind of deodorant, isn't it?)

old.sparkles

According to wiki, Avon was only a county from 1974 to 1996 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_(county)

BEVS

Do you know what ! I hadn't actually really realised that Avon was no more. I still think of Bristol & Bath to be in Avon, perhaps because I spent so much time up there with my Mum at the Min. Hospital. There was a road sign 'County of Avon' with a crest on the route up to Bath from Bournemouth & as I left Wiltshire somewhere after Warminster.

Gordon Barlow

The main reason I stick with the old counties is that I'm a long-time family-history buff. So because my English ancestors all lived in the old ("real"!) counties, and Linda's Scottish ones, those are the ones I record and remember. Mine were mostly from the West Country. (Does Herefordshire count as West Country? It does with me...) If anybody on BE has any connection with the village of Tintinhull, I'd be glad to hear from them.My mother's paternal great-grandfather was the blacksmith there, back in the day.

old.sparkles

Do you know what Avon county was before 1974? Found some older maps that suggest my have been part of Gloucestershire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...ies_of_England

Pollyana

Partly Gloucestershire and partly Somerset - Bath was part of Somerset

old.sparkles

Thanks Polly - was finding it hard to judge.

Just found this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ingdom#England - which seems quite extensive. Doesn't show how new counties were formed though.

My mum was from Warwickshire, which has always been a county, but I think the West Midlands area would be part of the original area covered by Warwickshire

Pollyana

Yes, you're right, Birmingham used to be in Warwickshire, many moons ago, and is now part of West Midlands. My knowledge is just based on memories of places I knew at the time of the change - we lived on the Shropshire/Worcestershire border in 1974, which is how I remember Birmingham changing. And my Gran lived near Bath, I remember Dad used to complain about it being in Avon whenever we went down there, he never accepted it as a "proper" county!

Gordon Barlow

For anybody reading this thread who is interested in his or her British ancestry... the best places to start are the County Record Offices. I always found them extremely helpful. Only occasionally, are parish registers found in the relevant parish churches, and it's always a thrill to see the names written by the parish priests or their deputies, for baptisms, marriages and burials.

But what can be frustrating, is the reluctance or inability of some uncaring writers in the registers to get the surnames right. My family lines include surnames Hain, Hayne, Haine, and Haynes all of the same family! Even from one generation to the next! I was once in contact with a distant cousin in Australia who told me that when her Haynes-etcetera emigrated to Australia in the late 1800s (from the same village in Somerset), they gathered together and decided that henceforth they would go by one single name: Hayne. Good for her!

Pollyana

I spent many thousands of hours back in the 1970s and early 1980s poring over parish registers in our various churches, as certainly back in the 1970s the majority of churches retained at least some registers in the vicarage/rectory. However there was an issue, which got worse as the 1970s progressed, whereby we actually had to start restricting access to the registers. I remember at one point it had been normal for me as a teenager to go through the registers with parishioners, or interested parties from elsewhere tracing ancestors, but that had to be stopped, and the Vicar/Rector (my Dad) had to always be present also. A lot of parishes invoked similar rules. Eventually it became such a problem that the majority of churches surrendered their registers to be held in county archives.
The reason behind this was a practice undertaken by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), under which they would baptise people into their church, even though those people were already dead.
Neither the person being posthumously baptised, nor their family, had any connection with the Mormons, and the family were never consulted before the person was posthumously baptised. The idea was that the person's soul could be saved at the time of the Resurrection, even though they had not been baptised into the church until after their death. In the early-mid 1970s this was a very common practice - teams of Mormons would go round British country parishes, taking details from the baptism registers going back in some cases to the 1700s, and then use those details for the dubious practice outlined above. It really came to light when some families received notifications from the Mormons to say that their grandfather John Smith, or whoever, born in 1898, was now a member of the Mormon church. I remember there being a kind of Vicarage Hotline in our county, where if a team descended on one parish, the incumbent would phone all the surrounding ones and warn them.
Need less to say this misuse of people's details caused distress to a lot of families. The depositing of the records into the county archives was an attempt to control this practice, as it greatly restricted access.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_for_the_dead

Remember that back in the day many people will not have actually known how to spell their surnames. I even remember cases in the 1970s when people would come in to see my dad to organise baptisms, and they would ask him for the correct spelling of various forenames, as they liked the name but had no idea how to write it.

Rainydaze

I can assure you pollyanna that is the most disturbing thing I have heard today, the spiritual equivalent of necrophilia. Far out.

In the 60s, 70s and 80s, my grandfather helped many people overseas trace their family histories. He lived in a small village on the Cavan/Monaghan border in Ireland, where most families had experienced chain migration out to America and Canada in the 19th/early 20th century (including our own). He was well known as the genealogy expert in the village, so other families would send their visiting Americans up to Granda to fill them in on their families’ lore, where they lived and farmed, which families they intermarried with, where they were buried, etc. . He would also visit all the churches (Catholic and Protestant) to consult their births deaths and marriages records and write back to people overseas. It was all very tea and jam sandwiches. But such a nice history when I think of it.

Gordon Barlow

Pollyanna. I didn't know that about the Mormons. I thought they only "baptised" the ancestors of members of their church (who - the members - might not yet be Mormons, of course). They were very helpful to me (the London Temple, this was) when I was just beginning. They never followed up on my research - which means they never knew who I had found. So how could they "baptise" any of them?

Rainy: no disrespect to you, but I really don't think we can equate the baptising of dead people as akin to necrophilia! Cripes. And whether their spirits are in the care of Jesus or The Bad Guy, they (the spirits) ought to be safe enough from any kind of interference by anybody living today. No?

Gordon Barlow

True enough, but the parish clerks or whoever wrote down the surnames should surely have checked in the book and matched baptisms (for instance) with the parents. In my experience, most clerks (or the parsons) kept the faith in that regard; and it was only a small minority of backwoods-parish registers that failed to do the matching. Deepest Somerset parishes were prone to inaccurate matching, deepest Herefordshire ones were not. I would be interested to discover - if it's possible - the histories of the parish clerks in backwoods parishes. (I presume that the parish priests would be educated enough to be accurate, and conscientious enough.)