Pollyana

Parish clerks? Not in your little country parish, my dad would've given his right arm for a clerk, to save my mum and I acting as unpaid secretaries Back in the day most records were written up by the priest/vicar/rector (usually in their best handwriting!) and whilst the majority of record-keepers would've been as diligent as possible, once you go back to the mid-1800s and earlier, you see "errors" in the best kept registers for so many reasons, not least because of the family and the recorder having different views on spelling - or even on what their actual surname was. The variations in spelling you mention earlier could be attempts to correct a previous mis-spelling, as much as an error creating a new variant ANd if there is a change of vicar, and the new one believes the name has been spelt wrong all along, so records it a different way........ its fascinating to follow some of the trails back and see how names change over the years for whatever reason. One parish we had, we took over from a vicar who must have been in his 80s and you could see how his writing deteriorated over the years, making it nigh on impossible to see at times what the name was supposed to be!
Some parishes kept various records besides the official registers and notes could be quite enlightening - things like a girl who has been known by one name all her life, coming along with a fiance to discuss marriage, and discovering she is officially known by a totally different forename - her father went off and registered her birth, and provided the same name for her baptism, but didn't use the name his wife liked. So the child got known by the name the wife liked & only discovered her "real" name when she came to get married

Rainydaze

Lol Fair enough, but my instinctive response was to feel it was a nonconsensual act upon a soul as opposed to a body. I’ll quit now because I’m drifting off topic into bizarre philosophical territory!

Gordon Barlow

In 1981 I visited the little town of Drom in Tipperary where my Dad's Hickey & Leamy ancestors had been dirt-farmers. I looked up the Catholic priest there, and he showed me around. I told him of the hostility that existed in my home town of Toowoomba. between Proddies and Micks. He was horrified. "We've always had a great relationship here", he said. "Your ancestors would have helped build that Protestant church over there." Nice to know! My Mum (Cornish-Congregational) married a lapsed Irish-Catholic, and twenty-three years later was still "that woman" to some of his family. Sigh... Wisely, they split the difference and married in the Church of England, and we kids were brought up C of E. Two fingers to both teams!

Rainydaze

Good going.

My parents’ mixed marriage (Catholic/COI) resulted in a bit of kicking the can down the road, with the result that I can remember bring Christened age 7 into COI. That said, my other Granny still took me regularly to Mass. We were the classic “fallen between two stools” Irish family.

Interestingly my mother says it was relatively common for her contemporary mixed marriage families to religiously split the family by gender. So eg all the girls would be raised in their mother’s faith and the boys in their father’s one.

Gordon Barlow

I wrote that Toowoomba was my home town, but that was only after Dad retired from the sheep farm out on the Downs. Before then - up till I was 15 - my "home town" was just a collection of sheep farms of various sizes (1500 to 10,000 acres). There was a general store down by the railway "siding", and our little school was a mile south of that. Beside the school was what we called a "bower shed" - a roof with tree-branches lying on chicken wire, with open sides all round. That was where our community held its quarterly church service, with a visiting "Bush Brother" and a borrowed piano. The Bush Brothers were parsons - possibly not real ones - who serviced the whole state of Queensland (I'm guessing about that). It was a Protestant service, I think, but I'm not sure about that, either. There was never a visit by any RC priest - so either there were no Micks in the catchment area or the RC Church just left it to the Brothers!

Gordon Barlow

Well, it's that time of year when conversations around the barbie focus on reminiscences - of old friends and adventures, and that sort of stuff. If I were at one of the barbies, this here would be my first reminiscence.

I got a Christmas greeting last week from my old chum David in Christchurch, NZ. He & I found ourselves sharing a cabin on the ship to England in 1963, with my mate Bob and one other. We shared a flat with four others in London that winter. When I hitched over to Hamburg to buy a car, we met up in Berlin and drove back together. Fun times! He hitched back to NZ via Afghanistan, while I went on the road with Linda through the Middle East and behind the Iron Curtain. I phoned and invited him to be my Best Man in '67, in Toronto, but I knew it was too much of an ask.

I stayed with him and Trish in Ch-ch with Linda in 1970, and with Ross in '85. Ross was almost ten, and still remembers David driving his 1942 Jeep like a madman - a wild event nobody could forget. Any BE member with old memories... it's your turn to tell us!

brits1

I have plenty of lovely memories from my childhood at Christmas time (I truly believe christmases back then we’re much better than in this day and age) memory is from not so long ago really but it “stuck” with me but this morning even more so, I was driving our eldest “over the tops “ this morning to just north of Leeds, it was -3.5 frosty a full moon but dark (It was 6am) and I was telling him about how it reminded me of our first Christmas back in the UK after nearly 8 years overseas and that we were actually “doing” the same thing in 2004 on the same date, roughly the same time, just the two of us (back then I was taking our son for trials at Sheffield Wednesday) at the time “Driving home for Christmas”came on the radio, it felt like the song was made for us lol and we sang along and both said to each other how Christmassy it/we all felt and that we were thrilled to be home at that time of year and just as I was recalling this to him (he remembered anyway) “Diving home for Christmas” came in the radio…perfect timing …now our Son is a grown man…. but just where the flipping heck did the years go….gulp.

Gordon Barlow

Ahh, but it's the memories that keep us young, brits! I hope you've got photos all over your walls at home, to remind you. My favourite in my house here is one of me and my son, standing on each side of the signpost outside the village of Barlow in Derbyshire, taken with one of those delayed-snap cameras resting on the top of the car. He was 14, and I had just signed him up for his boarding school over near Uttoxeter.

brits1

Its “funny” how certain memories/photographs stay with us, I take tons of photos but are hardly in any Lol. I have for many years sent postcards to ourselves (sounds mad) but in The early 1990’s we had a our first holiday overseas with our sons who were very young and as usually I sent postcards home to family and friends when I thought I would send one to our home and describing the holiday on the back etc and I have done it ever since (only when we have been overseas) and to this day it’s still lovely to see the colourful postcards and read what we had been up to. I have never been to Barlow, is it worth a visit?

Gordon Barlow

I haven't visited Australia for 30-odd years, but I have friends there, and am interested in what interests them. The nationwide surge of interest in the culture of the country's original inhabitants is a hot topic these days, and it's worth putting a few more shrimps on our BE barbie to cover it.

Where I grew up - a sheep-raising district on the Darling Downs - aborigines were rare. There might be a few men who turned up at our annual gymkhanas, but that's all. No women. I've no idea where they lived: not on any of the farms I knew about. Maybe in some of the little country towns - Tara, Surat, Miles... But they were invisible to us. In Toowoomba, too - population 70,000 at that time. Even at my boarding school in Brisbane, there was only one - and he was a member of what came to be called "the lost generation".

Today, there is a flourishing "black heritage" movement, loosely based on the "black power" one in the USA. An Aussie friend of mine is very sympathetic to the cause, and has been educating me about its progress. It seems a suitable topic for this thread of ours. What do you reckon?

Gordon Barlow

Just a time-out opinion on the title of this thread... I began it in March, in response to a question as to why this Australian Forum was less active than its Canadian cousin. There has never been a satisfactory answer. Visits to The Barbie are still a lot fewer than visits to The Maple Leaf, it seems to me. Are Canadian immigrants more sociable than Australian immigrants? Maybe. Is Australian culture somehow less welcoming? Hard to say.

Ah well, it is what it is. I opened a thread on The Maple Leaf, in June I think it was, which has a more interesting title than this one! "Life's Turning Points", if you want to check it out. Each of my two threads gets about 2000 visits a month, which is not bad. That's reason enough to keep them both going. What do you reckon?

BEVS

Gordon. Mr Barlow.

Anything but anything that adds interest and difference into the ancient halls and corridors of BE these years is very welcome.

I could wax on about why one is more inviting than the other but most everyone knows why really. Tone is everything sometimes.

Gordon Barlow

BEVS. Maybe I should have started my "Back in the Day" thread here in the Barbie instead of in the Rest of the World; but RoW needed a boost, too. As for the General forums, our masters tolerate far too much back-biting in some of those, so I keep well away from them. Ah well, what can you do? (A rhetorical question, by the way!) BE's business tenets need a bit of a shake-up, but all in good time, I guess.

(PS. I loved your story in the "Small World" thread in RoW! I had to ask Professor Google what a Yam-Yam is; is there anything that fellow doesn't know?)

Gordon Barlow

I am intrigued, and a little amused (in a nice way!), by the current "First Nation" political movement in Australia. Speaking/writing as a foreigner these days, it's interesting to see how much it seems to have borrowed from the platforms of similar movements elsewhere. The "First Nation" label comes from Canada's "Indians", and the "Blak" label is copied from the descendants of African slaves in the USA. I like the "Blak" label, but am not comfortable with its application to white (i.e. the colour white) descendants of aborigines. I see what the political spokespeople mean by it - and the invented spelling helps a lot - but in my current homeland (a little island in the Caribbean with a mixed-race population of 70,000, including immigrants), "black" is a colour, not a political statement. Here, "black" is the colour of the paint you buy in the hardware store. We have many black people living here, and a fair number of "dark" ones - ranging from "very dark" to "pretty dark" - and many more "brown", ranging from dark brown to light brown down to white-ish. The point is that nobody cares. Although...

When I first came here, I was pulled up friendlily by one of the young women in my office who told me she didn't consider herself black because she had a grandmother over in one of the eastern islands who was a Carib. (Caribs were a dark-brown South American race who lived in the eastern islands when the Europeans first invaded.) So when I asked what colour she considered herself, she thought for a while and then said "dark chocolate". Fair enough. Not that it ever came up in conversation again, but it was good to know!

Gordon Barlow

Sorry, brits, but I've only just realised that I never answered your question about the village of Barlow in Derbs! The short answer is "NO". Sadly, the village has nothing to recommend it at all! Some of my forebears lived in wonderfully romantic villages - mainly in the West country. Even Bathampton (outside Bath) where a Barlow great-uncle lived is nice, down by the pub and the Kennet & Avon canal. But Barlow the village isn't worth a visit. My Barlow ancestors were from Sheffield - scissorsmiths since 1650 or thereabouts - and might well have come from the village, but it was never proven. I've done quite a lot of family-history research in England, over the years, and loved to wander around the graveyards attached to small country churches. Have you done much of that? Anybody?