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« on: Wednesday 05 August 20 22:27 BST (UK) »
Most of the family tales from my mother's side of the family seem to be based on truth, if not entirely acurate.
My maternal grandmother said she had a brother who died of typhoid before she was born - true. She said she had a brother who drowned before she was born - not true but she had two uncles who drowned as schoolboys when they went skating on Saham Toney Mere and the ice gave way. Someone lived in a flat at a mental hospital - pretty much true, one of her cousins married the chief male nurse at St Audrey's Mental Hospital, Melton, Suffolk, and they lived in the East Lodge. There was an architect in the family - well one of her uncles was a surveyor who advertised himself as an architect for a while. The poet in the family - not sure, family papers contain a number of sheets of paper with poems written on them, but who wrote them? She also wrote a list of places where family members had lived and all have proved correct.
From my father's side the family opals which were stolen existed, they were a wedding present to a great grandmother from her cousin who was a jeweller and opal trader in Australia and vanished when a great aunt died and two uncles helped themselves to some of her effects before the executors could deal with the property. Now if only we could find the truth about the Russian, possibly a painter, in the ancestry of another great grandmother on my father's side. Every branch of the family traced so far has a variation of the story.
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