Are You Having Problems?

Hi everyone

From the comments under my previous entry, it seems a number of you are having problems with journals.  Either you are lacking Add New Entry Button, some were lacking all buttons, one person had a problem with text size and others could not add pictures.

Joe, the Journals Editor has now done a posting asking people to notify him of all such problems. I have emailed quite a lot of you pointing this out but this is for all those of you who have not received an email.

Please go to the following entry, be sure to state your problem and be sure to leave the link to your journal.  Joe wants to know just how many people are affected.  Here is the link:

http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/entries/2002

In the meantime I have had to access my journal by downloading another browser and going into my journal that way.  It is not an ideal situation but until the problem is fixed that is all I can do.  Please do send in your journal problems as it will hopefully enable them to pinpoint the problem.

Thank you

One thing after another

Decided to do an entry today.  Aol was having none of it!  The Add New Entry button had disappeared from my journal completely.  Nothing could restore it.  Someone suggested I clear my cache, I had done that five minutes earlier only to find that all my buttons had disappeared.  No Add Entry, no delete entry, no edit entry - absolutely nothing.  In desperation I decided to system restore to yesterday.  Lo and behold all the buttons came back but.........................my text has now gone very small and nothing I can do seems to change it.  Last time that happened I was able to change the size of the text by using the wheel on the mouse, this time that has not worked so here I am peering at the screen and wondering what else can go wrong!

I have been busy working on the family tree and getting over a horrible flu type bug that I picked up from the family.  Received some documents from Germany that make me wish I could speak and write German.  Lots of interesting information though and  because I do understand the word "kinder"  I was able to work out what children belonged to whom. I am slowly piecing it all together.

The rain here has been almost endless.  There are great pools of water lying all over the garden, it just starts to dry up a little when another downpour comes along.  It is all churned up like a motor cycle scrambling course!  The dogs do not mind but him indoors does,  having to constantly dump them in the bath.

Not much else going on around here except for last night when in the middle of the evening we heard a rumbling sound and saw flashing lights.  It seems that the gas board were digging up the road right outside our house.  We have no idea why because there has been no smell of gas as far as we are aware and it all centres on the property directly across the road from us as workmen were going in and out of there.  Anyway around 11 p.m. they packed up and went leaving a red and white barrier surrounding the hole.  This morning along come two men in a van to fill it in.  It had rained heavily in the night.  The hole was full of water.  We then witnessed the typical British workmen.  They stood and looked at the water in the hole,  they scratched their heads.  I noticed they had a pump with them.  They looked from the pump to the water in the hole. They examined the pump from all angles, even looking underneath it. They scratched their heads again.  They tried to start the pump.  They obviously had no idea what to do.  They stood looking at the pump for a long time as though it was some alien creature.  They gave up on the pump and came back to look at the water in the hole.  They walked around the hole, they went to their van and sat inside for a while.  Then they returned to the hole and stood looking at it again as if expecting that some fairy had sucked all the water out for them.  Then they shrugged, got in their van and drove away.  We still have the water-filled hole with the barrier around it.  Obviously far too difficult a job for them.

Nathan and Daniel are coming on in leaps and bounds, Nathan seems to learn new words everyday and Daniel now says "Oh no" all the time, something he learned from his Bob The Builder toy mobile phone and also says "goodbye" very clearly.  They are very good boys on the whole and get on well together apart from the occasional spat.

Well, I had better get off here.  I intended to come on for half an hour, do a journal entry, catch up on some journals and then go and get some work done.  The best laid plans.......... I did not anticipate being on here for hours trying to sort out problems.

Thanks to the other Jeannette (Travels) for trying to help.  Whether the buttons are going to stay on my journal or not remains to be seen.  I am just glad that I have been able to post this entry.  Fingers crossed that I can sort the fonts out now.  Have a good weekend dear readers and friends.

Snow! Photo Entry

It is such a rareity in this little corner of South East England, I just had to post these

 

Alas it has all turned to freezing slush now but it was pretty whilst it lasted and Nathan and Daniel had great fun as did Jesse and Jack. Jack could not make out what it was.  Mike only took video of them though.

 

Popping In

Hello my friends.  I thought it was about time I put in an appearance.

Still busy with research.  At the moment I do not know my Heinrich's from my Wilhelm's!  Mike's cousin in Germany has been very patient sending things through to me and I have reciprocated with copy marriage and death certificates. I have had to translate words for him and vice versa.  I still cannot get the tree to tie up and lead directly to Mike.  A mistake has been made somewhere but it will be rectified.  A surname change was found as well and we have no idea why this gentleman should change his name after his marriage or why he choose the name he did.  As he had no children there is nobody we can ask.

I have been held with doing as much as I would have liked because we all picked up some bug.  Strange thing it is as well.  Not flu but more a stomach thing but very vague.  We only know there is a lot of it around this area.  It starts with aching all over so badly you can scarcely move, feeling boiling hot one minute and freezing the next, complete loss of appetite and nausea, almost having to force food down and feeling very weak and very tired.  We have lived mainly on soups but thankfully we are all picking up now. 

We never did get any snow to kill off all the germs.  Apart from that it is the same old housework, scanning photographs to send to Germany and adding ones our cousin sends to our tree.  It will be a job well done when it is finished.  I have also been re-checking on the internet for information about other lines of the family as new information is coming online all the time.  I have not even started printing things off yet.

So, that is my update.  Nothing exciting.  Well exciting to us but maybe not to all of you.

I shall not be turning my alerts back on yet because this is something I really want to finish and I cannot cope with that plus all the alerts.  However, I will visit those of you who read this entry and leave your journal address. That is only fair.  In the not too distant future I shall be back to commenting regularly.

I hope that all is well with everyone and that life is being kind to you.  Wishing you all a lovely weekend.

Research Hat On

Hello my friends,

My last entry about Mike's Grandfather sparked us off on research again.  I had finished my own family tree and put everything to one side.  However, we decided to see if we could find out a little more about Mike's family.

We had already received, a few years back, quite a lot of information from Mike's second cousin Wilhelm in Germany but I have written to him again asking for further details.  I have also been researching online as we discovered a little mystery about the second husband of Mike's aunt.  I think I have managed to track where he came from.  I have also managed to find Mike's two half-sisters.  Both are dead now but I was able to add that information to the family tree.  Mike never met them through circumstances that occured in the family and neither of them ever married so there is a full stop under that one.  I also want to find some information about the place the family originated from in Germany.

I have also been applying for certificates which will give more information.  Once I started my journal, the family tree got sidelined.  However, now we have Nathan and Daniel it is important that all the information is put together correctly and printed off as well as being saved to disc.  The boys are the inheritors of all who came before them. 

One day they will be grateful for all the information and I hope they will add to it themselves and keep it going.

So, for a while I am going to put this journal on "hold" so that I can concentrate on getting that done.  I am still limiting my computer time until my neck is really better.  I have to look after it.  Once before it got so bad I had to have physio for three months and could do practically nothing for around four months. I do not want to go down that road again.

I know you will all understand that I shall obviously not be commenting on journals.  The family tree has always been very important to me.  The people on it are no longer forgotten names, they are individuals again, individuals who had all the same hopes, dreams, problems we all do.  I hope their names will echo down the years and give future generations an insight into past lives.

I hope to be able to share some further information with you about Mike's family, if he is agreeable.

In the meantime, please do not think I am ignoring you or do not wish to comment or that I have lost interest in my own journal, it is just that I have "got my research hat" on right now and that is taking all my computer time.

Have a good week everyone.

He Gets A Look In

Him indoors has sometimes commented that since I began this journal, I have written quite a lot about my family and my ancestors but his family have never got a look in so to speak.  I tell him that he did not have a family - he was hatched!

So today I thought I would redress the balance a little.  To be honest, we do not have a great deal to go on.  Mike never knew his Grandfather (on his Dad's side).  Grandfather passed away when Mike was just a toddler but I will share with you all the facts that we know. 

Christian Friedrich O  arrived in London on the 3rd July 1890.  He was sixteen years old and had sailed entirely alone from Germany where he was born and where his family remained.   He was the son of Wilhelm Gottleib O and Eva Maria Gebert and the second of their nine children. We can never know what prompted him to uproot and settle in England.  In the town where he was born, the family were quite prominent, several of his ancestors being Mayor of the town.  His father was a master baker and that was the trade he was to follow.

Whether he stayed with a cousin or some other relative is not known but he remained close to the London docks in Rotherhithe. I cannot speak for today, but in those days it was one of the worst areas of  East London,   It was poverty stricken and the crime rate very high.  It must have been tough especially for a young lad, newly arrived on these shores and speaking no English.  That is probably why he lived where he did. The German community tended to stick together exactly as the Irish and the Chinese and all other nationalities did.

He worked very hard at his trade learning all there was to know and becoming a master baker and confectioner himself. It is very likely that he had known his future wife from back home.  She would have been fifteen when he left Germany. Whether they had already taken a liking to each other or fallen in love, cannot ever be known.  But at a later date she came to England as well and they were married on the 30th July 1897.  He would have been 23 and his bride 22. There has always been some mystery as to her name because it varies on different documents.  Sometimes it is Christianne Rose, sometimes it is Christine Rosa and others just Rosa and her surname was Weiss.  So they settled into married life and Christian Friedrich opened two shops, one in Harringay and one in Wood Green. They prospered.

They had four children Lena Rose (1899) Christian William (1901) Frederick George (1904) and Harold Albert (1912). Three of them followed their father into the bakery business, Christian and Frederick became bakers both owning shops in their own right.  Lena married Albert K and after the death of her father, Albert who was also a baker, took over the two shops that her father had established and the business continued and was then eventually run by her two sons, Robert and Leslie.  It was the ever increasing growth of the supermarkets that finally put an end to it all. The last child, Harold, had no interest in bakery whatsoever.  He wanted to be a doctor and so it proved.  He became an orthopaedic surgeon at Whipps Cross Hospital in London and later a well-known Consultant. 

Here is a picture of Grandfather and family. I have no idea when it was taken:

Back row, left to right: Harold, Albert K, Christian (Mike's Dad)
Middle row, left to right: Lena, Grandma, Grandpa and Alice (Christian's first wife).
Front row, left to right: Robert K, Eileen O, Leslie K and Phyllis O.  Robert and Leslie being the sons of Lena and Albert and the two girls being the daughters of Christian and Alice. (Mike's half-sisters)

There is not much more I can add about Mike's Grandfather. In 1911 he formerly changed his name and from then on was Christian Frederick and the surname became more English sounding. The papers relating to his change of name and British citizenship were signed by Winston Churchill who was then the Secretary Of State. Grandfather was, from what we have been told, a very kind and gentle man, a hard-worker and a great family man. We do not know if he was a religious man or whether he had any hobbies. Apart from the facts I have stated, we know nothing else. This is the only other photo we possess of him.  Taken later in life.  His eyes look so very sad in this picture. Mike wishes so much he had known him and I feel the same.

He died in 1941 at the age of 67.  We have no idea where he is buried.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed this little insight into the family of him indoors.  I have enjoyed writing it and I know Mike is pleased that his family has had "a look in " at last.

Snug As A Bug

It has been a while since I wrote in this journal.  Had a few health problems which seem to be improving now but I still have a very painful neck and left shoulder so I am still trying to keep my computer time down because typing hurts.

Well, the cavity wall insulation was done last Thursday.  I need not have worried.  I was absolutely amazed at the speed.  From the time they arrived until they time they left was forty minutes and around ten minutes of that was taken up with drinking the tea and eating the biscuits we provided for them and then getting us to sign all the paperwork when it was done.

As for taking all the ornaments down, it proved unneccessary.  No vibrations at all.  In fact the noise I had dreaded was not much greater than my washing machine on spin cycle!  So we were well pleased.  We have noticed a difference and are keeping our heating thermostat down low.  Just as well we had it done.  British Gas, without any warning or notification to us, have raised our gas bill by £9 per month and our electricity by £7 per month.  Absolutely scandalous. We only found out when we saw it had been taken from the bank.  We shall certainly be changing our energy supplier in the very near future. 

The community charge will be going up again in April.  It amazes me that they think pensioners can pay these sort of prices when the pension never increases to cover them.  It is a worry but I know there are thousands in our position.  The government do not give a hoot about it, why should they?  They all sit there earning enormous salaries and getting perks and when they retire they write their memoirs and get paid heftily and then they often take up a position on the board of some big company and continue to rake in the cash.  None of them ever have to struggle like the rest of us, none of them will have to live on just a state pension and have to wonder whether they can afford to heat their home.

The schools around here are all closed due to the "winter vomiting bug" that seems a regular thing every year now.  What causes all this sickness?  We never used to have all this years ago?  Is it pollution in the air, is it the additivies and chemicals in the food, is our resistance getting lower? It does seem that there is more illness around these days than we ever had.  What are your views about it?

Mike is finally over his cold, my friend's funeral went off very well - her husband told me the other day.  Apart from that, not much news.  All very quiet here.  The weather is awful, strong winds, just started raining and it is so dark you would think it was evening.  Roll on Spring.

I will try and visit a few of you if I can but please understand that because I am in pain right now I might not be able to make it to you all.  Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Hope you are all having a good week.