Roots

While you were celebrating the launch of an insurgency that went on to overthrow an occupying power, I discovered my roots yesterday.

We took a two-and-a-half hour train ride from London north to Preston. Daddy spent a few hours in the Lancashire Records Office poring over some old parish records while Mama, McKenzie, and I wandered around Preston and stumbled across some memorials to early church members.

Daddy found the birth record for my great great great great great great grandpa John Bromley (Brimley). He was born in 1739 in Leyland, near Preston. He also found the marriage record for his dad, John Bromley in 1732, and a few other records.

Next, we took a train five minutes south of Preston to Leyland, where these ancestors lived. We went to the church there, St. Andrews, where they were all christened and married. It's a really old church with a big cemetery. We wandered around the cemetery looking at gravestones. We saw some from the 1800s. There were some older ones, but they were so worn you couldn't tell what they used to say. I kept asking Daddy, "Does this one have grandpa's name?", but we couldn't find it.

Anyway, it was neat to walk around the same area where my ancestors walked as long as 300 years ago.

After Leyland, we took a train an hour south to Liverpool. Liverpool is where my great great great grandfather, William Jedediah Brimley, left England with his family to go to Utah. He was seven years old at the time.

By the time we got here to Liverpool (I'm in Liverpool now), it was late so we just grabbed some dinner and hit the sack. Today we went down to the waterside and went to the Merseyside Maritime Museum. They had an exhibit about emigrants that left from Liverpool to go to other countries. They had this little room set up like a ship's lodging quarters would have been in the old days. Maybe this is what my great great great grandpa's ship was like.

I wonder how they felt when they left. Maybe like I felt when I left to come to London: missing my family and friends and toys, but excited about the new adventure. I wonder if they imagined their descendants might come back. I wouldn't be surprised if they did, but they probably never though that we could get here in less than a day (with a half-day flight from the States, and a two hour train ride from London). Well, I've completed the circle.