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YOUR LETTERS

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Should or shouldn’t I tell the family?

One Easter Saturday we’d decided to take the dog for a walk, stopping at our local pub. We sat in the beer garden and got chatting to a local family who were also enjoying the weather. The little girl was busy drawing pictures of great-granny. Her mother explained that her holiday homework was to do a project on her family. So the conversation naturally turned to their family tree. I showed the little girl how to draw out a family tree, and her daddy, a local farmer with a nice unusual surname, explained that they’d been farming in the village for 100 years.

My partner and the child’s daddy were deep in conversation so as our dog was getting very bored as we’d finished the crisps, we ‘girls’, the little girl, her mum and I decided to walk down to the church to look for the family gravestones. We had a very successful visit and found the graves of her paternal grandpa, great-grandparents and 2x great-grandparents. So on returning to the pub we roughed out a good family tree. In the following conversation her father said that prior to farming here the family had farmed some 15 miles away and that his remote cousins were still on that farm. His great-grandfather had moved to this village as he’d been a younger son.