A lot can happen in 10 years ...

One of the best sets of records to trace family groups in 19th and early 20th century England and Wales are the UK Census returns. I've been using them extensively to try to uncover my extended family's history, and have enjoyed looking up the places they lived, speculating on what  life was like for them. The starting point for a family tree is information from the memories of living relatives, but, unless you have a close family with lots of notes on who's who, perhaps even a family bible, maybe still living locally to your ancestors, then there are still plenty of gaps to be filled.

The census returns are a great resource, revealing a lot about how people lived; the size of families, the work people did and where they lived. The way in which, early on and especially in rural areas, there were no addresses - everyone knew each other, and few received letters because illiteracy was quite high.

The census returns are by no means perfect, something which, for me, adds to the fascination and frustration of working with them.

The recorders/enumerators had a very important job. Some created beautiful records, with clear handwriting, taking care to check and spell names of people and places correctly. At the other end of the scale, the records are almost faded to illegibility or are in a scarcely legible scrawl, with mistakes and misspellings, and on some, the black marks made by people checking or counting up the returns obscure the information.

This however pales into insignificance against the sheer weight of transcription errors I find. Many come from an inability to read older handwriting, failure to compare script on the same page and perhaps no knowledge of copperplate or cursive hand to work it out. (I'm old enough that we were taught 'joined-up' writing from age seven, with a big chart on the wall and hours of practice at forming the shapes of letters, then writing syllables and words.) Some errors are down to reading with insufficient magnification, the transcriber typing what they think they see, or expect to; others are due to downright laziness, or someone unfamiliar with the language, or perhaps they'd been drinking, or something. There was evidently no quality control, so if the genealogy company paid for this work, they were robbed, and if they didn't pay for it, well they can't expect anything of reasonable quality. Okay, so correct spelling is something I care about, but it's important in this context because of its effect on searches, in terms of their success and the amount of time and creative guesses it can take to get results.

An then there's the misreporting, which can be very entertaining. I expect most people told the truth to the best of what they remembered, but ages can float around (quite apart from the strange 1841 thing of rounding down adults' ages by up to four years!). I've had relatives grow younger by a couple of years on each successive census, or a couple who both reduced their ages by five years (which would have made their marriage illegal, if it were true) and a family of siblings, still single in their thirties, who variously selected ages up to nine years younger than they were according to their birth records.

Tracing the Irish parts of the family is proving very difficult, because the original census returns for Ireland 1861 and 1871 were destroyed shortly after the censuses were taken. Those for 1881 and 1891 were pulped during the First World War, probably because of the paper shortage. The returns for 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 were, apart from a few survivals, notably for a few counties for 1821 and 1831, destroyed in 1922 in the fire at the Public Record Office at the beginning of the Civil War.

Wonderful though these ten-yearly records are, they are still only snapshots. Some families are quite stable, remaining in the same house or the same area, with the same spouse, and you can track the children growing up, getting married, leaving home. Others seem to disappear, a particular problem when dealing with common names and moving to another county, or if you happen to need some of the missing records.

And there are some things that a ten yearly snapshot will miss, because a lot can happen in ten years. For example, it's long enough to lose one wife, marry another, have three children, for the youngest of those children and then your second wife to die, and you decide to foster the two remaining children with their aunts and emigrate to the USA. There are no records which will reveal whether the younger children of the first marriage were left with their older siblings, or whether the second wife became their step-mother, no personal histories to know how they felt about that.

I feel like a detective. For every small step forward and question answered, a whole new crop of questions can arise. Every chink of light creates more shadows.

I can't wait for the 1921 census to be released, although it won't be available until 2022. It will be essential to help fill some holes in my knowledge of who did what, where and with whom. And I hope I won't see as many transcription errors!

Big Butterfly Count 2020

One thing still possible amid all the restrictions imposed around the Covid-19 pandemic is to linger somewhere quiet for a quarter of an hour or so, and count butterflies. Despite the changeable weather for this year's butterfly count (17 July to 9 August), including several days which were a complete washout, I did several 'counts' in my garden and became quite obsessed with going out to see what I could find, noting my observations in my diary.

Here are the results, which include a couple of day-flying moths:

Species/Dates	19-Jul	28-Jul	29-Jul	30-Jul	06-Aug	07-Aug	08-Aug	09-Aug
Small White			1	1
Large White		1	1	2	2	1	1	2
Common Blue						1
Small Tortoiseshell			1	1			4	3
Red Admiral		2	2	2			1	1
Peacock		2	1	2	3	2	1	1
Comma				1
Meadow Brown			2
Ringlet	1
Six-Spot Burnet	1
Hummingbird Hawk Moth				1
Day total	2	5	8	10	5	4	7	7

11 species was quite good compared to other years, but even on the best day, I could count the day-flying lepidoptera on both hands, so I could have wished for more. There were days where I didn't really look and others where I was out in the garden for a quarter of an hour or more, but saw nothing, and then forgot to record that I saw nothing. Most of my observations were more than quarter of an hour, which probably increased the number of species observed, but the numbers are the maximum number observed at any one time, to avoid double-counting.

What no Painted Ladies, Orange Tip, Large Skipper, Speckled Wood, some sort of Fritillary perhaps? I would also have expected to see Silver Y moths on the Buddleias, if not in full sun, then at least in the evening, but I didn't see any. It might be that the adult butterflies aren't on the wing in the three weeks of the survey.

Buddleia davidii is a controversial plant. I even saw a post of Facebook claiming that the nectar is toxic to butterflies and bees. Of course, whoever posted it didn't give a source or link for reference and I have found nothing to support this (because, of course, I cannot resist searching online to do a bit of fact-checking). There's no denying it is an extremely invasive plant, which can grow in all sorts of conditions, from nooks and crannies with very little soil, light, dry soils, compacted and often wet clay, and given a nice depth of fertile soil can go from seedling to flower within one year, and become a spreading, towering shrub within two.

I have a love-hate relationship with it. I was lazy last year and didn't dead-head assiduously enough or even prune, and this year there have been seedlings everywhere, and new shrubs which escaped being weeded out last autumn (I think I thought they were Verbena bonariensis seedlings. No such luck). None of the shrubs I have are in quite the right place, a visual reminder of how much work I need to do in the garden. On the other hand, once they flower, they attract all sorts of invertebrates; not just butterflies and moths, but drone flies, hoverflies, various bumble bees and this year, lots of honey bees. Various spiders hang out in the leaves and branches, as do snails, which don't seem to do much damage to it. When I work in the garden, I get to see them all up close and get wafts of honeyed scent.

The problem with invasive species like this is that in the wild, and potentially even a garden, they can affect local biodiversity. They outcompete and replace native species of wildflowers, so reducing both species diversity and nutritional diversity of those native plant species. Although the bees, butterflies and other foraging species love the Buddleia, they need diversity as well as quantity and quality of nectar and pollen, to ensure a good nutritional content and balance, 

When I input my observations and checked my profile, I found they have leaderboards for the number of observation sessions (counts) and butterflies. I am waaaaaay down the boards;  at 3000+ for counts, at 7000+ for total butterflies seen. Not that it ever occurred to me that this was a competitive thing, but there are some very serious butterfly counters out there. I was feeling very pleased with myself to submit results from 8 counts, now I feel like I should do better next year.

Clockwise from top left:

female Common Blue; Comma, just hanging around; Busy bee; Humming-bird Hawk-moth

A Virtual Walk around the Village

Not the village I live in now (although I might write about that sometime, too), but one I used to live in, a long time ago. My mother grew up there. Her parents lived in the same house all their married lives.

They seem so long ago now, those weekend afternoons when we visited. The Saturday lunch of fish and chips, picked up from the chippy next to the bus station in town, or a Sunday roast (with chilled Tizer as a treat, although the grown-up men preferred a glass of Mackeson stout). Then we might 'stretch our legs, get some fresh air and walk it off'.

It's one of those fine days, with blue sky and sun playing hide and seek with fluffy clouds and only a breeze. Come on, put on your coat and boots and let's take a walk.

Down the front drive with its chalky banks and garden full of weeds, although the gardens on either side are well-kept, with a bee-hive near the adjoining hedge on one side.

Watch for cars as we cross the road to see the horses in their meadow. Marina and Atlanta, manes and tails flowing like water as they canter away. As we walk towards the school, the vicar comes out of the vicarage drive, taking his Dalmatian for a walk, but he is going the other way, towards the common. At the staggered cross, there's a tree with a seat which circles its trunk. The lucky tree, to overhear the conversations of passers by, and watch little girls run around its seat, arms outstretched, face turned to the patterns of the leaves against the sky.

One road leads to the church and the main street, another heads up alongside the school to a housing estate. Look, that was my first classroom, and my mother's too. But today, we'll go straight on.

At Cuckoo Bridge, the old canal is overgrown with trees and nettles, but there is still water in the bottom, and probably deep mud. Silted up over time, the cutting was much deeper. For 120 years they had trouble with water levels and enough traffic to make it worthwhile, until it fell out of use and was lost, the last few miles forever dammed by motorway and ring-road, and housing developments. 

Shall we turn up the track to the railway footbridge, where we could check the signals for an imminent train, wave to the driver and count the carriages as it passes under us? Then walk down to the rec to play on the swings and watch the archers practising? Or run down the road as it dips to go under the embankment, into the darkness of the tunnel, pausing to shout 'Hello! Cuckoo! Echo!' and hear our voices rebound off the walls. Then perhaps a train would pass over us, turning the world to thunder as we run to the other side, our hands over our ears against the noise.

I remember a ditch running with water and culvert pipes to carry it under house entrances. Where was that? I learned the names of the wildflowers on those verges and watched for frogs and toads.

Soon we are at the corner with the old village well and quaint brick and half-timbered cottages with thatched roofs, and the topiary peacock,  A few steps on, and we join the main street through the village.

Back past the chapel and Goodall's Garage, where we'll Put a Tiger in our Tank on the way home? No, on to the river, past the lane which leads beside the recreation ground to the railway footbridge. Hard to believe there was a clay pit and the lane led to a brickyard, well before my time. Past the big house opposite the green expanse of the rec. There used to be a huge horse chestnut tree, great for conkers, on top of the bank opposite the big house, until the owner had it chopped down.

There was an old motte and bailey here, though there's nothing to see except a rise in the land. Then we are at the sparkling river, with swans and mallard ducks awaiting some crumbs of bread, and an old Muscovy duck who comes from the mill up the lane to the right, Stand on the bank here and look into the water, near the clumps of weeds, see the shadows move? There are trout in these crystal waters, camouflaged against the gravelly bottom.

Let's cross the bridge to go up the hill. Further along, the banks near the copse are a bed of primroses in spring. We'll take this lane which skirts the marshy ground where the young river is finding its way. It's a stroll to the next mill,where we can cross the river again and walk beside it, watching damselflies and dragonflies dart over the watercress which has spread from the beds upstream. Pause, feeling small under the tall arches of the viaduct, then carry on to join the lane near the bridge. Here's the Grange Farm, with its red brick walls and massive barns, Around the corner, past the drive, the wall continues. There used to be a haystack here, and so many sparrows, investigating every nook and cranny for spiders, insects and seeds!

On the other side of the road, the gateway to the site of a Tudor palace built on the site of an even older castle, destroyed in the Civil War. Centuries ago, there were people who also thought this village the ideal place to live. I've never seen the gates open when I've walked past, although it must be open to visitors sometimes.

We could carry on to the church along the main street and cut through along the lane to the seat around the tree. No, we'll turn up the lane by the pub here, it's not so far. The canal came under the road, but it was filled in and those houses are on top of it. I wonder if the owners know, or even care?

Here we come to the junction with the brick bus shelter where we could wait for a bus into town. There's the path to the common, but we'll go left, just a few yards and then we're home. Time for tea!

.

.

.

There has been so much development in and around the little village. The main street is a conservation area, so it's still beautiful, but the average price of those little cottages and village houses is now half a million pounds. There's a Mercedes on the drive where my grandfather's Ford once stood. The house has been extended. There were only two bedrooms, so my brother and I slept on camp beds in the front parlour. There was a fireplace, but I don't remember it being lit. A paraffin heater was used to 'take the chill off', the flame put out before we went to bed. 

I remember snuggling under the blankets in the darkness, listening to the muted voices of the grown-ups going up to bed. Once all was quiet, I listened to the wind in the trees and the distant rushing rhythm of trains passing in the night.

Two-of-everything ratatouille recipe

My first experience of ratatouille was not a happy one. While I was living in Paris, I treated myself to lunch at a little cheap and cheerful café in the Latin Quarter. Served with fresh bread, it was a bowl of acidic, over-salted mush in which the individual vegetables were unidentifiable. Not nice. It completely put me off even the idea of trying it again.

Some years later, when I started growing my own vegetables and had a sudden glut of tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes, I had a go at making it myself, using a few different recipes, until I settled on my version, which has become one of my comfort foods.

Recipe

You will need:

2 onions (I prefer red onions, but whatever you've got)

2 fat cloves of garlic, crushed

2 sweet/bell peppers (I like to go for different colours)

2 courgettes

2 aubergines

2 cans of chopped tomatoes

2 heaped teaspoons vegetable stock (bouillon) powder

A couple of big pinches of dried mixed herbs/herbes de Provence (or a small sprig each of fresh, thyme, rosemary, oregano, sage)

A couple of good glugs of olive oil

salt and ground black pepper to taste.

I  prefer to use one of my Dutch oven pans, heavy, broad-based and deep enough to add all the veg, water to cover (and more if I want it soupier) and not spit broth all over the stove when I lift the lid to give it a stir.

Chop the onions, peppers, aubergines and courgettes into roughly 1"/2.5 cm pieces.

Start cooking the onions and peppers in the olive oil, and add the garlic as they start to colour.

Add the courgettes and aubergines so that they start to cook and soak up the oil.

When the pan looks dry and the vegetables start to catch and colour, add the canned tomatoes. Rinse out the tins with hot water, adding this to the pan so that the vegetables are covered.

Add the herbs and vegetable stock, give it all a good stir, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally if needed to stop it catching on the bottom of the pan.

It may need longer; the vegetables should be soft and melting but still retain their shape.

Serve and enjoy. Fresh baguette or crusty roll, glass of red wine ... or over a baked potato. Or on its own if you are aiming to cut the carbs.

Notes

I find it best to keep the vegetables in proportion, so all medium-sized or all large (hopefully without the aubergines and courgettes being woolly and full of seeds).

Modern aubergine varieties often do not need salting to remove bitter juices, but if you've grown your own and they've been water stressed at all, it can still be a good idea, and do the courgettes at the same time.

It freezes and reheats well, so I wouldn't bother trying to make a small portion with small-sized vegetables, as two cans of tomatoes will be too much, although two big beefsteak tomatoes could work.

I don't know how many this will feed, because I invariably have a second helping, but it usually lasts me at least two days.

If you're feeding a horde you can double the quantities of ingredients.

You can stretch the definition of ratatouille and stretch this further by adding a couple of potatoes cut into 1"/2.5 cm chunks, or stretch it even further by adding more water so that it's more like a soup. Or just go mad and use it as a basis for a big vegetable stew by adding a can of chickpeas or cannellini beans, sweetcorn, chunks of butternut or other squash, increasing and tweaking the seasoning as needed.

Yearning for the beach

The weather has turned windy and rainy after six weeks or so with hardly any rain. On the warmest days, I would have loved to go to the beach, but what with the lockdown due to the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, it hasn't been sensible to go there. I've missed the sensory pleasure of being there (although not missed the inevitable crowds). My yearning gave rise to this ....

Au bord de la mer

Hot bright sunlight on my face

Drying salty hair and lashes

Legs wet with sandy splashes

Feet tingle with shingle scratches

Cool wavelets’ sea foam catches

My skirt hem like liquid lace

Inspiration and Perspiration

This May I have mostly been making ... a mess.

I am determined to get this back garden productive and at least two thirds of it laid out, and the patio tidied, by midsummer.

The weather has been amazing since mid-April, in that there has hardly been any rain. We usually have a dryish couple of weeks in April and May, and it starts turning rainy and changeable from midsummer. But the weather has stayed beautiful, day after day, as if to spite all of us locked down due to the SARS-Cov-2 Coronavirus pandemic, not allowed to go to beaches. We are supposed to stay local - no more than 5 miles from home, and even if I parlayed that into 'as the crow flies' instead of road distance, the car parks and toilets are shut. If you can't walk there, you can't go there. I have been out in the garden every day, if only to do a small job, or just watering. I hit a bit of a wall mid-month, where I had to have a couple of rest days, as my muscles and joints were so painful. Little by little, I have started to be able to work longer or harder, resting as soon as I need to, resuming when I feel up to it.

The brambles spread atrociously last year, when between painful joints and lots of rain, I neglected the garden. It has been cathartic to hack them back and dig them out, even though I couldn't burn them as I only like to light the incinerator when it is at least drizzly, so that no neighbours have washing out. I have been tackling the garden on all fronts: patio, herb, mint arc, both herbaceous areas; as usual, all of my balls in the air, playing the moving squares game by tackling areas of weeds and brambles, trying to create space to move plants and plant contents of pots. The big prize is to clear the areas for the veg beds, which have become full of herbaceous plants and weeds, and said herbaceous plants need somewhere to go.

The progress is almost imperceptible. Only the compost heap gives a clue, having doubled in height.

The mints arc and herbaceous bed beyond it were to occupy the area between the house utility/shower 'extension' and the lilac, which was a gravelled area in which things seeded themselves and failed to grow well, except for Sedum rupestris, which must love the dry, limey conditions, and bramble, which is just a complete thug and grows everywhere. There is some of the troublingly ubiquitous bindweed coming though too. Huge old plants of Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla mollis) and a couple of Hellebores have established themselves right at the edge of the bed, and they will need to go.

I was told by someone, possibly the sellers mentioned it in passing, that there was some concrete under the gravel, but when I had previously stuck a fork in to work some bramble or dandelions out, I didn't find it. This time, having raked off a couple of inches of gravel, I found areas of concrete and patches of fine grade, blue-grey ballast or aggregate. I stuck the pick into the concrete a few times and it broke easily, in some place only half an inch thick or less, in others perhaps a couple of inches. It looked as though there might be a void underneath.

The gravel bed, having found concrete

I suspect it was a level base for a shed, but my neighbours don't know or remember anything about it.

I carried on clearing and digging, creating a sort of terminal moraine of gravel, concrete bits, aggregate and soil under the edge of the lilac. In places the concrete I broke and removed had a layer of aggregate under it, laid on top of a permeable membrane; in some places, that aggregate had another thin layer of concrete underneath it and on the membrane, in some places, stuck to it. So this all became a rather longer job than expected, but isn't that just the way of things?

It would have been so much easier to leave the gravel and use it as an area for pots, but I want to see my plans realised.  Part of that includes recycling the paving slabs donated by my next-door neighbours a couple of years ago into paths between the veg beds, and the gravel, aggregate etc can be recycled into a sub-base for the slabs, along with the rest of the stone I keep digging out of the garden. Another neighbour commented how much concrete and stone she finds in her garden, and how shallow the topsoil is. I would have expected it to be deeper, as these houses were built on damp meadow-land, so I suspect the topsoil was taken off to level the site for building in the 1950s and not put back again. Ah well, all the more reason to make compost.

I've become fitter and able to do enough to work up a sweat. Being out in the garden, with the birds and greenery, has been very enjoyable, my exercise and inspiration, saving my sanity a little in these locked-down weeks. 

Spider observations, and a new species for me

The garden seems to be full of spiders. The compost heap and all the paving is alive with some type of wolf spiders, and possibly more than one specie of them. I tidied the garden cupboard and evicted many 'house' spiders and most of the plant pots and trays which were hanging around on the patio have had a spider or two in them. A walk through the garden disturbs nursery web spiders. The house is still full of Pholcus phalangioides. The Golden Girl Araneus diadematus on my living room window frame survived the winter, then one day, she had disappeared, hopefully out to find food.

Strenuously brushing off some moulded plastic plant trays ready for reuse yesterday evening, their undersides full of snails, I found I'd also brushed out an egg mass in a case, which had torn. Out of the case emerged a slightly agitated female spider, so large (18-20 mm) when she uncurled, she made me jump. She was quite shy, very attached to her eggs, so I gathered them up to have a closer look.

Could this be Steatoda nobilis, the Noble False Widow? (Yes, the same one the press get so hysterical about, with horror stories of infected and necrotic bites.) I asked in the British Spider Identification group and it was confirmed. After all this time, when I'd never seen one, and if the females are this big, I'm sure I would have noticed! Come to think of it, if she has eggs, there's probably a male around, unless she's eaten him (apparently they do, sometimes). They seem to be getting more common and widespread, and this wouldn't be the first Pembrokeshire record for the species.

So, a new spider for my list. Except I don't have a list, so now I want to start one. I haven't been taking much notice of the spiders in the garden, but it would be good to identify what's here. The spider ID group is full of photos of jumping and crab spiders, to the extent where I have spider envy, as I haven't seen any here. But then, I also haven't been looking.

Meanwhile, I'll have to find this big mama a new niche, as she can't go back under the plant tray.