As you see from the photos the scaffolding is going up on
the Pav, so I can realistically see Wetherspoons Royal Victoria Pavilion
opening next year.
Here in the bookshop I have just finished helping someone
trace their family back to where they lived in Ramsgate in 1849, we found them
in the 1849 directory and on the 1849 map so now they have toddled off to see
if the building their ancestors lived in is still there.
They had recently completed the much quicker and easier
process of using the internet to trace their family back to 1066 and obviously
had already been to Hastings to see the battlefield. I did however get the
feeling that they were coming to the conclusion that perhaps there were some
things written on the internet that were not entirely based on facts, and that
it was just possible that at some point in 1250 someone hadn’t remembered to
fill in a form properly.
The medieval period, also spelt mediaeval and mediæval, is
also called “the dark ages” and “the middle ages", covers the period from
around 400 AD to around 1500 and from the historians point of view can be seen
as a long and confused period where not only did hardly anyone ever write
anything down, but in fact hardly anyone could read or write.
Of course The Venerable Bede did write a bit down about
England in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in about 730 and there
are the various Rolls, like The Great Rolls of the Pipe.
Anyway contemplating this business of tracing one’s family
back to the conquest I sort of gave up and scanned some old photos of Ramsgate,
here they are.
It is funny you know how little trace people leave, even my
parent’s generation who were very much alive active and working twenty years
ago, apart from a few family photo albums – mostly full of unidentified aunties
and uncles, there isn’t very much.
In the middle ages you really needed to be landed gentry or
a criminal to leave a mark, by the 1600s being a great artist could do the
trick and by the 1800s a famous writer.
Oh yes anyone else noticed this boat floating above the water in the harbour?
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.