I love M&S. It has the best clothes--and specifically the best shirts and tops. They are so soft and they last forever.
Anyway, getting back to the Eurocar office an hour later, the two people in front of me had apparently given up and one car had come in--a tiny Fiat 500, baby blue. I took it even though I was concerned that it would not be good in highway driving. I needn't have worried. Although there were times going up hills that it hardly made it, there was so little of what we think of as "highway" driving that it hardly mattered. Highways in England often mean that you'll be able to get up to 60 miles per hour between the many, many roundabouts. Oh, and be sure to look to the right when entering a roundabout. You only need to go into one to figure that one out.
Anyway, I was on my way to Bristol, where I was meeting my cousin Alison Stewart, who I had been corresponding with through ancestry.com. I arrived at about 5:30, rather than the 3:30 I had originally hoped. I actually met her at her parents' home on a really beautiful circle in Bristol.
Alison's father is James Flanagan, Mary Mooney's brother. He is married to Una McDonough Flanagan, also from the same area in Galway. James came to England when he could not get work in Ireland. He was a master carpenter, just like our grandfather, Patrick Kelly, his great uncle. He lived in a number of cities in the UK, including London for a while, but finally settled in Bristol, where he eventually started a business as a builder. His brothers Ignatius, called Ignus and Gerard joined him eventually.
He had three children--Alison, Robert and Noel. Alison married Simon Bennett--not an Irishman--and had three children--Thomas, Lucy and James. Here is the family:
On the back row are Finley Flanagan, Robert's son, Lucy Bennett, Simon Bennett and Jamie Flanagan, the son of Noel Flanagan, Jim's brother (He was visiting from Cloonoon, Ireland). Seated are Una and Jim Flanagan and Alison Bennett.
Here's another picture with me in it.
The family was so nice and so accommodating. I had a wonderful room on the top floor and all the food, tea ans wine I could want. We talked a bit about our ancestors, but we had done that before online. What I wanted to know was how a person who showed up as a third cousin in the ancestry DNA test was related to me, but we could not figure it out.
Alison and Simon took me on a tour of Bristol after dinner. The city is filled with huge mansions that are often now converted to apartments. But the grandeur is still there. According to Simon, Bristol was an important port in general but it was in the slave trade that the city made much of its money. And with the decline of that business, the city declined as well.
But there are still signs of its former glory
And it is the home of Erdman productions that does a lot of stop-action films like Wallace and Gromet and Pirates from last year. Right now there are many Gromets around the city painted in various ways, including this one in front of Brunnel's suspension bridge--one of the first in the world, according to Simon.
Bristol is incredibly hilly and behind me is a very deep gorge that is the mouth of the Avon river. That means that the bridge is the setting for quite a few suicides, says Alison.
By the way, I manged to get to Bristol fairly easily but once I got into the city, I was totally lost. I called Alison and she and Simon came and got me. When I left the next morning, Simon drove my car to a place just outside of town so I could get on the highway easier. If not, I would probably still be driving around. All of these old towns are just impossible to navigate for an outsider.
So in the morning I was off to Cornwall.
How cool that you met up with some of your cousins. That's the best part of doing ancestry research.
ReplyDeleteThe driving sounds scary.