Playing Angels

 To put this into context, the school of my childhood was regulation small. Two teachers with 20-40 kids across eight years.

The working bee to make the playground after the septic system was installed had several tractors at it's disposal, and a full contingent of outdoors men all trying to outdo one another.

It was the playground of kids dreams. 

There was a cubby house made of an old electric wire spool that could house three little kids - bright red with a door and a window cut in;

A swinging bridge with timber planks strung by high -tensile cables across 80 metres of gully:

A pyramid of logs bolted together with big industrial nuts - steampunk before it's day;

A treehouse with a ladder through the middle and rails all around, Swiss Family Robinson style. ***

There were four girls and a boy in my year. One, occasionally two the year above us and one, occasionally two the year below. **

There was J, the tall, confident one; S, the pretty blonde exuding a tough skin; H, the feisty, sporty redhead - and me, the nerd. I devoured long words for breakfast, dreamed over recipes for food that I would never eat, and observed from the sidelines in hindsight a lot. ****

This , of course, made it ideal for us to take on the roles of Charlie's Angels*, being action heroes across the swinging bridge in the downtown of our imagination. We would entice littler kids, who were always harassing us to get them to do so, to be the Mexicans or bank customers or spies in our dramatics.

J and S (& occasionally W from the year below) were hybrid Jill/Kris Munro characters, while H and I were Sabrina/Kelly girls. It is one of my strongest childhood memories.

That and the night where I wore pyjamas out to dinner.

* Recently at work I joked about us being (insert my boss's name here)'s Angels and realised that I am now from the television equivalent of three Charlie's Angels generations ago. I discovered that those that I work with have only a historical knowledge of the original cast, and were comparing the Netflix series with the movies! Plural!

** I went to a school jubilee - I was going to say the other day but it would be twenty years ago now - and saw the boy from my year. We occasionally granted him the role of Charlie, but generally we never heard boo from M.

"What did you do?" I asked him.

"I played a lot with boys either 2 years older than me, or 2 years younger," he replied.

*** A year or so after I left that school, the education department did a safety audit and found the playground wanting. The cubby house was a great place for kids to hide after lunch if they didn't want to go back inside, the swinging bridge was a falls risk and the cable was shedding shards of steel fibres, the nuts were accidents just waiting to happen and the logs were extremely effective at camouflaging snakes, and there was no paperwork whatsoever on the treehouse! It was demolished.

**** I only today realise what The Spice Girls were emulating - Us!!!

The Middle

 Statistically, middles were approaching extinction until the intervention of both the pragmatism of need for aged-care workers and the whimsy of big family Mum bloggers.

In the good old days, families writhed with multiple marriages and fluctuating child records by the score - the role of the middle was shared by many, easily outnumbering the sole oldest of the brood and the never-really-sure-of-their-retainment-of-their-title youngest child. With the balancing equation of mortality, the middle was the far likeliest title of whoever you met.

In the modern world, however, we have our time-saving devices and keeping more and more people alive in more age categories and ability to control our fertility and make considered choices about the children that we conceive and carry. 

Is the most numerous the oldest now? 

This was by the logic that every oldest has been the youngest but not every youngest has been the oldest. Does that work?

Only children can be both.

 It takes at least three children to even get one precious middle these days.

Of course, once you get over 3, the middles are the majority.

I do know that when you come from a family of three, and you were the middle, you were never the only child at home.

Put away the violins! That wasn't what I meant. 

I read an article tonight about kids going to kindy at 3, and the family folklore was that my big sister was sent to kindy early as she would get bored at home.

 These days I think that it was for Mum to catch her breath in dealing with the "dream" of having a big kid and a baby, but that took a thick lens of hindsight.

I also think that big sister missed having her Mum. Both of them did. 

By the time I was a big kid, Mum had my baby brother AND a schoolgirl to juggle.

I never got her alone.

Then I look at the family of my 6th great-great-grandfather, born himself in the melee in the middle of 6, then had 13 children with two wives, all peasant labourers in small neighbourhood communities where at least two generations either side had come from less than 5 miles away.

All very, very middle.

Now we three are dealing with being there more for our parents. Pretty darned happy that I am one of three.

And the middle. Love you both heaps (& your spouses)

BTW history nuts - I googled "what happened in 1703 UK" and found out about the great storm. Oh my.

Sonny and the Crew

 One of the benefits of genealogy is you get to be a detective and imagine lives from clues. You also get to look at loved ones and think "the world has seen this before" or "ahh, now I see why".

I never met my father-in-law. For the early years of our marriage, V's father was a very (very) rare late night phone trip. But when he did, he was quite the tripper. 

I can still remember our first conversation. There was a string of words presented to me that rang like poetry and made me have to think - while at the same time making no logical sense whatsoever.

There is no way in this world could I ever imagine my father in the same communicative space as him.

But when you open the doors to generations above, you realise that you are cracking the books on whole different genres of lives.

In the last years of his life, however, he was a regular Saturday afternoon converser. Over several conversations he gave me clues about his family. 

(It's such a pity we have the technology in this day and age to be concerned about privacy that I obscure it, because it's a really cool name.)

Now that I have started to scratch the surface on the family tree, while I have not yet found one or two mentioned who were real people in his recollection, the few that I have found makes up  for some of that.

Another benefit of genealogy is seeing the real impact of economics and geography on groups of people through time, as well as the social effects of education and religion and alcohol and music and sugar and sobriety and shame and acceptance through a lens of history.

So while I can find five generations of working with animals going back through the same names on different continents in this section of my family library (mimes a bookshelf), there and there I have two sides of Crimean War fallout,  here we have several generations of marry early, marry often, and light on the paperwork trail Americans wandering around Missouri from Civil War days (I have now learned at least three things more about Missouri in the  Civil War) before the desperate gallop each generation to get to California.

It's been very enlightening.

Pre-dawn musings before a drive

 I am not a fan of being cold.

I didn't waken that way however. I woke up hot from too many covers and in a strange bed (at Mum and Dad's place).

I am over here because the long awaited road trip is finally looking like all ducks align (crossing as many bones as possible).

My mind then switched to grinding on whatever subject handy rather than putting itself back to sleep mode - and through throwing off the hot covers am now shivering despite piling them all back on.

Insomnia has been known to plague me, and generally at home I will get up and do it sleep eludes after a certain amount of time. I don't have that luxury here.

From the bed, however, I have planned potential routes for the road trip ahead with Dad.

D'ye Ken John Boyd

 I figure,  with the profligacy of John Boyd's in the world - and the proliferation of progeny of their offspring, chances are we are all descendants of a John Boyd.

My John Boyd was a Scot, a stone mason and a man who sat on council in the new land, one who signed a public letter of thanks to certain crew members of the ship he sailed out on, 

and one who hosted his daughters' double wedding.

Romantic? Or Canny Scot?

I know all of this through the little bit of research that I have done myself.

For Mother's Day I got myself an Ancestry deal - and the "grab a bargain" part of the deal (I wonder where I got that from) meant that I had to dedicate myself to exploration of that forest.

I found his Margaret, I found that he was also, apparently, a publican (that counterbalances the sheer weight of abstinence society founders in another branch) -  I even found a photo of either him with his brothers - or his son, also John Boyd, and his other sons. Whoever they were, I wouldn't mess with them!

And he is just 1 of the 32 of his generation in my tree.

(When researching for a photo for the above facts, I came upon:

-  a John Boyd who may have been instrumental in sending my John Boyd out - for history geeks check this article!!!!!

 - a John Boyd that comes with a trigger warning  - link contains explicit descriptions of court charges and the offence as well as editorial comment.

Hopefully not my John Boyd - This article from 24 August 1861 - 162 3/4 years ago and published in the Sydney Mail, page 6 on a Saturday - could be written today.)

 - and a John Boyd reference in an article where the sheer number of topics covered 

  just tickled me 

- OMG a John Boyd instrumental in an amazing rescue 

I must stop now because they keep coming and I must get to bed. So - do you ken any John Boyds?