Foot Steps

There are similarities between generations, it was only after my dad, Arthur, died that I was actually interested in those previous generations, only after the prime source of family information had passed away was the boy genius prepared to research his lineage. I'm certainly not the brightest bulb on the tree and the simple lesson there is, talk to your mum and dad if you have them.

The family information was difficult to come by, but two of my dad's sisters were still alive and I made contact with them, one of which had good information, the other quite vague and forgetful. It was through the pair of them that I found my full grandparents names and approximately when they were born, once a few pieces of information were found the detective story grew exponentially.

In late 1975 me and my first steady girlfriend got slightly pregnant, we were eighteen years old and frightened. I thought for the longest time that I was a disgrace to the Weldon family, an outcast, a black sheep for doing this terrible thing.

In reality I was just following a family tradition, which was uncovered through my family tree research. My great grandfather, Joseph, met his girlfriend Rachel in 1883 and within a few months she was pregnant. At the time it was probably a more shameful experience than my own, the social stigma of a child out of wedlock in the late nineteenth century.

What was uncanny though, besides the echo in time, was the location of that echo. I was born in Liverpool and we moved to Whiston when I was eleven years old, I moved to Romford, Essex when I was sixteen but was still coming home to Whiston at the weekends. I met my girlfriend in Liverpool, she lived in Kirkby a few miles away and I'd see her at weekends, mostly in the front room of my parents house on Pottery Lane.

A short walk away from the house was an area called the Whiston Pottery and it was here in 1883 that a young girl called Rachel Hardman lived. Rachel, who was a potter there, somehow met Joseph, who was a potter at the Prescot pottery a few miles away. Rachel was soon very much pregnant which resulted in baby William Hardman in 1884.

Ninety-two years later, my daughter, Susan, was probably conceived within five hundred yards of the Whiston Pottery. the birthplace of her great-granduncle.

It was a difference in time of nine or more decades, but we were all fundamentally the same people, in the same situation and it amazes me how, even though we all move about on the planet, we unknowingly travel in similar peoples footsteps.

Echoes.