Sarah my great great grandmother in The View from the Terrace

One of my hobbies is genealogy. I really enjoy finding out about my ancestors, the way they lived and the places they lived in. I've always had this interest, but progress was slow until the Internet and mainly limited to things that elderly members of my family could tell me. I didn't have the time when I was younger to travel around the country looking up records. But in these last twelve years, with more and more information coming onto the internet, and having more time now that I am older, I've extended my family tree to around two an a half thousand names and have traced some lines back to the early 1600s.

At the moment I am working on my mother's grandfather's line. Well his mother Sarah's line because he was illegitimate and I don't yet know who his father was. She really interests me as a person. I think it is partly that she was obviously a bit of a rebel in her day. After having my great grandfather she went on to get pregnant by her uncle by marriage! His wife, her mother's sister had died. Eventually she became his second wife. Perhaps she was pushed into that by her parents who maybe didn't want to bring up another illegitimate grandchild while she was in service to earn money for his keep, which had been what happened the first time around. But perhaps she did love the man who became her husband.

I wonder who the father of her first child was and why she didn't marry him. I have fantasised that maybe he was her employer's son and meant for better things! They were a big industrial family in Sheffield. I have been inspired to write a short story about her and what might have been.

One thing that did upset me was looking up the village of her birth. I knew she lived in a farming community and her father was a scythemaker. I had visions of little cottages surrounded by fields full of sheep and cows. The village was called Mosborough and when I did a Google search what did I find, Mosborough Asda super store! It is a district of the city of Sheffield now. I guess life moves on.

It's funny to think that if Sarah hadn't got pregnant out of wedlock I wouldn't have been born, nor my mother and her sister, or their mother and her eleven siblings.