Born and Bred

I am in Birmingham, the place of my birth and where I was bred. Or is it?

My Mother would consider herself a Brummie through and through. Her parents were born in Birmingham but there the trail stops. Her maternal Grandmother was from Dublin but with a Polish name who knows from whence her family originally hailed, our trail ran cold a long time ago, the maternal grandfather was also living in Dublin, a baker by trade; that is all we know of him. My mother's father's family were less complicated, the male line came from Worcester and were axle forgers, whole families and several generations of them, mostly called Stephen. The female line came from Gloucester, three sisters apparently abandoned by their parents who all lived in close proximity, their families intertwined around a house in Weaman Street they owned for 60 years.

My father was another kettle of fish completely. His grandfather had walked to Birmingham from Wales in the 1860s and began adult life as a miller as was his own father. He ended up with grocers shops. My father's father travelled, the family moved from Birmingham to Portsmouth and back again several times and Portsmouth was where my father was born. His mother was from a long line of stonemasons from Stafforshire who travelled round the Midlands working on churches. On one of these trips, my great grandfather had met his wife and they married and moved to Birmingham. Even she had a tale to tell because her mother was German and how she had ended up in a small Warwickshire village we will probably never know.

So here I sit, the product of all these different places. Not really bred in Birmingham at all.