« Reply #13 on: Wednesday 04 November 20 11:00 GMT (UK) »
You are welcome Mowsehowse and oldfashionedgirl.
. I hope all the Royal Flush survived the early births!
I have just thought of another personal coincidence. My Grandfather was widowed twice and married a third time. When I was a child I would visit them either with my Mother or on my own. She was a lovely old lady, this step Grandmother but we all called her 'Aunty'. Aunty had two children - a married daughter and a son who lived with them (quite old too) who had been reputed to have spent many years in Morpeth. (asylum). I remember that he did not seem very well even then and appeared to be suffering from seemed to be what we would think of as shell shock. He would have bad turns sometimes, especially if there was a sudden noise. As a child I would find myself sometimes staring at this usually silent man, and unusually for an adult he would stare right back. When I was eleven my Dad's sister took me abroad with her family on a plane. When we came back and were almost about to land I got this sudden forboding sense that he was dead. I said to my Aunt "Uncle Bob is dead". I can't remember what Aunty said but I do remember that when my much older brother came to pick us up in his car one of the first things he said was to tell us that Uncle Bob had just died. I remember Dad's sister's mouth nearly dropped open.
Then last year doing a little bit of research, I discovered that my step Grandmother had had two more sons who I hadn't known anything about. Both had served in WW2 - one drowned and the other has a war grave in Holy Cross Cemetery.
Then onto this year pre lockdown... I do a little bit of voluntary war research and an email from a very old lady was passed on to me wanting to know about 2 named people who had been killed through the war. Well, when I looked into things I found that these two men were actually my step Grandmother's brothers! Both had been killed with their families when their homes had been bombed. Of course, I got straight back in touch with the old lady and related my connection and asked if she might be a relation of step Grandmother. However, she said she had only been a child neighbour at one point and had been thinking of them. So it was the coincidence of her email being passed on to me (of all people) that I discovered what sad things this step Grandmother went through. Not only one son who seemed to have shell shock and two died through the war but also two brothers and their families lost. I really don't know how she managed to keep so stoic!
Conroy, Fitzpatrick, Watson, Miller, Davis/Davies, Brown, Senior, Dodds, Grieveson, Gamesby, Simpson, Rose, Gilboy, Malloy, Dalton, Young, Saint, Anderson, Allen, McKetterick, McCabe, Drummond, Parkinson, Armstrong, McCarroll, Innes, Marshall, Atkinson, Glendinning, Fenwick, Bonner
