Roots, Chat and Romanies

Courtesy of Helen Musselwhite

I've been taking the time to investigate some of WH's ancestors whilst the weather has been cold and I'm not up to doing much for other reasons. At the end of last year my pc crashed rather spectacularly and all my family tree files were lost, the majority of them hadn't been backed up elsewhere, unlike all the stuff littering my desk top. I've now bought a brilliant external hard drive which saves everything automatically so I never have to worry about missing files.

But back to the family Tree, I did still have a paper record of it all amongst a foot high pile of paper which had been languishing behind the desk since the move here last July. So January's project anyway was to sift through it all and sort it out. It's really been quite useful having to input all the data into my Family Tree programme for a second time as I can weed out the rubbish and get a refresher course on some of the stuff I had forgotten.

WH's family or that section of it are descended from Romanies and searching back through the old censuses has been almost impossible in some cases. Because they travelled around and did not have permanent homes, they often escaped the enumerator's pen and where they are recorded they are usually at the end of a particular section (the enumerators were instructed to record them there) and in a lot of cases their names and such like were ignored. Quite often I come across a record like '7 travelling gypsies living in tents', names, places of birth, age etc etc all recorded NK, or not known. Where they were recorded there are errors, names and places are spelled incorrectly, ages are wrong; after all most of these people were illiterate (as were many others in regular houses) and enumerators wrote only what they heard, often phonetically. Couple that with people with strange accents and even stranger names and a very odd mix appears on the sheets and that's when you can read the writing. Names like Tryphena, Hezekiah, Power, Vashti and Defiance were commonplace amongst those communities. One girl I came across was labelled Finance!

I like a challenge however, and over the last 7 years I've amassed a wealth of information about gypsy families travelling around the South West and even further afield. If I couldn't find 'my' lot then I followed some of the other families and eventually like the proverbial bad penny one of 'mine' would pop up, living with cousins or some such and tagged on the end of family record, misspelled and wrong aged but enough of a link to know who they really were.

Only recently has it all begun to come together however. I chanced on a website where researchers help each other out and chew over such thorny problems as some of mine. Roots Chat is amazing and people are only too willing to help, regularly doing 'look-ups' for strangers and even in one case I read using their own 'paid for' credits on other websites to search for information. I also found some Romany Genealogy sites, these have been a mine of information and it's been fascinating reading about the lives of the travellers about which I had hitherto known very little.

Yesterday I was contacted by a Romany lady who lives quite near here and who is descended from the same families. We have lots of the same information and it will be fun comparing notes. She also suggested we could meet up in person and invited us to her Romany home which was very kind of her and totally unexpected. I'm not sure we can meet up at the moment, I'm really not well enough to go off meeting strangers and there is so much to do here, WH won't thank me for dragging him away for a day on a Family Tree jaunt. But one day we will meet I'm sure and learn more about the past and the families who have passed on their legacy of the travel bug to WH and several more in his family. Now I'm even beginning to better understand this complex being I live with.

And yet another one

I've been awol a week with weirdy viral-y symptoms which sort of went enough for me to have a couple of wonderful meals out with friends at the weekend (apropos of nothing special, just good times) then returned on Monday to strike with a vengeance.

It's not my year so far is it?? I've got Viral Labyrinthitis now, big name for what is really vertigo with a viral cause. At least it's not a reaction to the new osteoporosis drugs I'm on which is what I thought, corresponding as it did with the end of the first week of those and the first dose of the stuff that stops the calcium from leaching out of my bones.

Driving to my spinal X-ray appointment on Monday afternoon at least I had the presence of mind to call up WH and get him to rescue me as I was falling asleep at the wheel. X-rays over, he took me home and I slept for 17 hours. I can barely remember the X-rays themselves other than the lovely trainee Russian radiographer who apologised for having to do 7 plates. 7 ??? When?? I remembered a couple maybe. I slept most of yesterday too and then awoke this morning relatively chipper until I tried to move. A swift consult at the 'acute' GP clinic this morning (at least the Noctor referred me to a proper doctor) found the cause of the problem and thankfully it wasn't the drugs at all. Now I just have to wait for the bugs to bugger off.

The most annoying thing is that it feels like I have the Hang-over from Hell but I didn't drink a thing. Honest!

Yet another diagnosis

I thought being diagnosed with Psoriatic arthritis in December and being told I'd had it since at least 1993, if not before, was bad enough. Yesterday I get a call from my GP who tells me all the scans etc I had over New Year have shown I have Osteoporosis in my spine - severe. In the interest of public decency I can't really put here what I said to her in reply.

So now I am left thinking why on earth did they not find this before. It's not as if I haven't been to the doctors recently; I have averaged 2 visits a week to my local surgery for one thing or another over the last 4 years. A lot of those things are bone/back/foot/ hand related. They have found out that I have 'multiple fractures of both feet on different occasions'. So is this why my feet hurt then. I did tell them often enough. It's not this recent GP, I haven't really said much to her about it, rather the previous couple, they ignored it so much I just gave up. Thought it was old age creeping on.

Now I'm down for more tests, xrays of my spine, bloods etc etc ad nauseum. I decided that I've got to get fit and I really need to do some load bearing exercise to strengthen my bones. Quite how I can, when at the moment every bone in my body is screaming in agony, my back won't seem to hold me upright a lot of the time, never mind the pain in my feet which has been steadily gaining in strength since Christmas I'm not really sure at this juncture.

I've also discovered that I am now 6 times more likely to break bones from minor injuries, this is obviously why I keep breaking ribs, (Neelu your words were prophetic) so I have to be a bit circumspect in what I do. No more offering to help with moving bricks and stuff with WH, I'm so clumsy I usually end up doing some damage anyway. I have a gung-ho approach to things like that anyway, if I can physically manage something at the time I'll do it, never mind the usual payback after the event. It helps me feel normal i.e. not sick - don't you know.

Yesterday I started the chewable calcium tablets 'especially suitable for the elderly' and have yet to take the once weekly thing where I need to keep upright for 2 hours afterwards and during which time I can't eat anything or take any other meds. OK, I know thousands if not millions of other people do all this and have the same diagnosis but surely not at my age, not really, honestly. Of all the crap health-wise I have had to put up with over the years, this seems to have affected me the most mentally. Trying to be rational I tell myself that it's not life threatening, millions are worse off than me and facing life limiting illness and far worse handicaps every day. I accept all that really I do. I just have one overwhelming feeling that I have never, ever had before. Suddenly, I feel old.

Snowed in.

One of the roads out of the village

Yup, that's us. 12 inches of snow over one night has cut off our village.

No post for 3 days, no newspapers and no bread in the village shop. What we do have is a wonderful, almost carnival, atmosphere as everyone abandons their normal existence for a few days and goes walking, sledging and even skiing. The streets are busy with folk out doing stuff. WE had a pub lunch yesterday and then spent the afternoon with friends. On the walk back lots of people said Hi as we all slipped and slithered in the freezing snow.

The Alps in England: look at all the skiers out on the slopes!

The waiting game

It's been a hectic week one way and another. WH arrived back from his annual skiing trip along wth the obligatory machine full of laundry; my cleaner, the lovely Ms T had a bad back so I had to clean my own house; we had youngest grandson (19 months) to stay for a night and a day and then had to take him back home over 80 miles away and what with blood tests, hospital appointments and all the usual business-y stuff I'm quite whacked out. WH has been working some odd hours too, meaning he doesn't eat his dinner until after 9pm so I'm still waiting to clear up and wash dishes at 10, my pet hate.

This week though it should be a little calmer. A slack week business wise gives WH the opportunity, finally, to tile the kitchen. With a short visit from the depressed painter looming, to do some touching up, I can almost see the end of the kitchen in sight. The one thing which conspires to thwart all this is the non arrival, STILL, of the sideboard which I ordered at the end of November. Actually it did arrive, despite all the suppliers promises (lies?) on New Year's Eve (should have been before 15th December) but when we opened the packages, the top was badly damaged as were 2 of the drawers. Hasty photo and email exchanging confirmed that it was a manufacturing fault and that we would be supplied with replacements within 5 working days. They didn't arrive. I took this up with Trading Standards or as they are now known Consumer Direct and it should all have been sorted by last Friday. It hasn't. So now I'm still walking round 3 large boxes, we can't finish the last unpacking and sorting out in the kitchen and the whole thing is now, not to put too fine a point on it, getting on my flipping nerves.

This whole experience of internet purchasing for the kitchen has actually soured my view of the process. An order for cooker hoods and stuff was cancelled because the firm failed to deliver in the set time and then could not even tell me when the goods were likely to arrive. Eventually I got a refund by resorting to my Credit Card company. The supplier had now gone bust so I'm glad I dealt with that straight away or I would now be seriously out of pocket and still awaiting the refund. The sideboard cost more, a lot more, and because I technically have all parts claiming a refund is not so easy. The firm used Paypal and they don't want to know, neither does the credit card company because a third party (Paypal) was involved. In future I will confine my internet purchasing to household names, little unknown firms will be a no no. They truly don't deliver.

So for now I wait and wait. I've turned my attentions to the old bathroom. It doesn't look like WH will be re-fitting that in the near future so the painter will be painting it as it is, the blind will be going up instead of my dreadful temporary curtains and a shiny new mirrored cupboard is waiting in the wings to go on the wall. Meanwhile WH will be finally fitting out the downstairs cloakroom and the utility room, all I need for that is a couple of cupboards, everything else is in the garage, just like me, waiting.