As my technical abilities are way beneath my intellectual ones you can gather I am in quite a fix at the moment. With a day or two to myself, although I almost had to work today and might tomorrow, I intended to fix some of the broken bits. "Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans" sang John Lennon and he is right.
I brought the wheel up to fix the puncture, then I began to seek my grandfather and his first wife through Ancestry. This meant I forgot the bike, except when I fell over the wheel, until today. So I removed the tyre, pulled out the inner tube, discovered the puncture in a strange place and checked the tyre. No wonder I got a puncture where there ought not to be a puncture, the tyre is falling apart, I thought it felt thin! Anyway I reached for the new inner tube I was going to insert, then fix the punctured one as a spare, when I realised the new one had one of those 'Shrader' car type valves, eejit! I took action, I dumped the lot and will visit Halfords tomorrow, it was too late today.
The other jobs, let alone the ironing and the trip to somewhere nice, must wait.
So it was back to granddad and his missing children.
He was born on a farm and ended up driving steam trains by the 1880's. He also drank and this cost him his two marriages. Plenty of kids from the first one, three from the second, from which I come somewhere down the line.
I have found it difficult using both ancestry and Scotlands People to find any trace of some of them. One poor lass is born in 1891 and disappears, I don't think she lived long but she might have gone to relatives in Newcastle with an older sister. Travel would be cheap as I think railway families went free and the journey would not be long. One man is found in the Royal Naval Reserve but I have yet to get his record, another becomes a jeweler in Cheshire and his sister joins him later but what happens after that? One daughter marries well, he had money, but she appears to die at 45 sadly. So many stories but so hard to uncover.
There is a problem in that dad never spoke of his father, or at least so rarely I canny mind anything he said. His mother moving them out affected him in that he determined to be a good father and look after his family, which he did and at some cost. Not that I understood that for any years.
Naturally I got involved in this and suffered yet another burnt dinner.
So tomorrow I may be working, i may be in Halfords and I may be grumbling on genealogy sites!