It all began in London

Well nobody enjoys the 13 hours from Singapore to London despite ‘Barbie’, ‘Napoleon’, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, ‘May December’, Boudicca’ and that timeless classic ‘Awakenings’. But it was all smooth sailing to our hotel and I have a bathtub!! Because I was sleep deprived and it was sunny so I took a ‘hop on, hop off’ bus tour from just outside my hotel to back again some 4 hours later. Sleep is improving. 

Highlights - changing buses after a child vomited - 10 minutes sitting on a boring road; spotted Australia House; so many glorious buildings and I especially loved the equally glorious Plane trees everywhere. We had a change of driver twice leaving us idling with no commentary. The audio guide would often cut out mid sentence as we arrived at the next item on the route. Memorable but not educational.

THE Tower below modern London

A statue outside Hyde Park

One of the Westminster buildings

 Today I met Mike aged 88 who left his home on the Isle of Wight at 6.20 am to reach London by 10.30am. Mike was the second person to share his DNA match list with me and his interest in understanding the real mysteries in his results has taught me a lot about genetic genealogy. Interested readers should look for furthers posts on the Buchan blog.

We had planned to have our meeting in the British Library, a place he enjoyed visiting when he took up genealogy in his 70s. Always exciting to find your relatives in national libraries I imagine. But there was a very long line to get into the building. So we used my hotel’s reception lounge. Later when I went by myself it was all about every bag being checked for something dangerous. The library was directly across the road from the hotel.

…….

The area around Kings Cross St Pancras station complex was the home of my only London family - that was lucky. The Ferris family arrived in the area from Exeter in Devon in the 1770s. The following memorable church was their parish church from 1820. My most fascinating convict ancestor, x2 great grandfather William Henry Ferris was born in 1825 and probably baptized in this church. William was transported using his mother’s maiden name of Hutchins. I think as it was his second offence, he might have been trying to fool the Court. See the post “A family of Ferris’s”.

It has two sets of these four woman and plenty of Greek columns. 

Bear with me as I learn to get images off my phone into the iPad to go into blogs.

This post has taken several hours and attempts to download the blogger app (for greater functionality) and seeming to run out of my free hotel WiFi allotment - but it came back - have been tricky.

Tomorrow it is on the train to Holyhead in Wales and then the ferry to Dublin.