Published on 12, July, 2020
II'm amazed at how many people here say English isn't thier first language and presumably thier heritage isn't either. How fascinating, in my stunning and vast ignorance I'd assumed that most people here would be from the UK, how international are we as a group of users? By the way I think multinationalism and multiculturalism are great, so I'm not trying to make anyone uncomfortable or unwelcome.
I'm English and have the usual English problems with language, I can be dyslexic in as many languages as you want to try me with, including English. I recently had my DNA tested with an ancestry site as I was researching my family history and found that I'm 84% southern English, which is apparently quite rare, most British people are a mix of Saxon, Irish and Scandi genes, so it looks like my families have been knocking about the place for hundreds of years.
My paternal grandmother was born in a place called Byker, near Newcastle, her parents went there from Ireland to escape the ‘Potato famine’. Her father is listed as a labourer. My maternal grandparents came from The East End of London and came to where Ive always lived to escape the ‘Blitz’, their parents were East End Labourers and worked at the Docks. Their surname is very Jewish, I would love to trace them all further back one day. I visited my Great Grandfathers grave in Malta, he survived the whole of WW1 without a scratch, on the way home he contracted the flu when aboard the ship bringing him home, more people died from the 1918 flu pandemic than died in WW1.
So interesting but sad that your great grandfather contracted the flu. Thanks for sharing that, found it very interesting to read. My great gran remembers being a nurse in the Second World War but none of my living relatives were in the first war.