Instant Cousins

Instant Cousins : archiving my ancestry

  • Grace, before marriage.

    This week I am concentrating on The 1911 Census return for a house in Acton, London. In 1911, Grace Walker, my grandmother, before she married William Wilcox, had moved to London from Offord D’Arcy in Huntingdonshire, to lives with a cousin. The address is 39, Mill Hill Road, Acton. It is a large house, three…

  • Whoops.

    I have missed my posting target this week and normal transmission will continue next week with an interesting story behind the 1911 Census return for an address in Acton, London, where my grandmother was living at the age of 20 before she met her husband, William Wilcox.

  • Whithorn, a field trip journal

    We have just returned from the Whithorn peninsula. The cone shaped peninsula that juts out from Galloway into the entrance of the Solway Firth. With gentle rolling hills and moors known as the Machars, grazed by the distinctive black with white strip Galloway cows, this hidden area of Scotland is steeped in history. The first…

  • First Residents

    I am writing this post in the smallest of the upstairs rooms. In all there are five rooms in the house plus a kitchen and bathroom. The kitchen was once the scullery, and it was built with a concrete floor with a gradient leading to a drain. This enabled any overflow of water from the…

  • The Cheesemongers of Bermondsey

    My Great Great Grandfather Samuel Walker could, I suppose be called a Bermondsey Boy. Born and brought up there, married in St. Mary’s Church, Rotherhithe. He was ticking some boxes there. He was not a Bermondsey Boy in the traditional sense. That sense would have its roots in the nostalgia of the 20th Century like…

  • St Helena

    An island in the Atlantic Ocean In November 2023 I wrote a post about my Great Uncle Sid. Sydney Wilcox was an Uncle who was definitely known to my Aunt Dorothy because of the photographs of him visiting her and my cousins in the 1950’s. Sid was a soldier with the Middlesex Regiment, the Diehards.…

  • An Interesting Wedding

    Laura Esther Spillett          1906 -1992 My Great Aunt Laura was someone who I can never remember meeting, if I did, I expect I was very young, too young to remember. I think that I heard my father talking about her. I have a nice photograph of Laura and my father at the annual Crowning of…

  • George Anderson, Wright and Builder

    George built my house in Earlspark Avenue. He also built the whole of Earlspark, other than some new houses that went up in the 1960’s on the site of a farm where George had his offices. George was a prolific builder in the beginning of the 20th Century. He bought up land from Sir John…

  • Stevenston, New Street Cemetery

    Last week I went on a field trip to Stevenston to search a cemetery in Ayrshire that I guessed might have the graves of some of the Nicol family who grew up and worked in the town for nearly 90 years. Stevenston is a town on the coast of Ayrshire that became associated with the…

  • Mapping the Nicol Family

    An initial chart of the Nicol family line after Peter and Elizabeth were married The family dynasty that Peter and Elizabeth Nicol created in the 19th Century with children who were directly connected or married into connections with the Dynamite Factory in Ardeer had taken me by surprise when I began to research them. Peter…