This Mother's Day weekend my sister and I have been perusing some interesting artifacts that our mother has piled up in a trunk. Treasures from the past. Andrea has signed up on Ancestry.com and has been tracking down our family tree. Unfortunately our Dad's family tree does not go too far back because when he was growing up Russia was in turmoil (something about a Bolshevik Revolution.....). She can only go as far back as his grandfather. Here are his parents though, in the only photo ever taken of them, Boris and Eugenia Komkov, before they died during the revolution and left him an orphan.
So Andrea has been concentrating on our mother's side, and I have to say our English ancestors were not exactly an exciting lot, and they never really moved far from around Nottingham and Derbyshire.
Here is my mom, Joyce, and her sisters, Gladys and Nell, around 1943.
Who knew that our mother would be the one to break hundreds of years of sameness and go galavanting off with our Dad, and later us, to various parts of Africa and then the U.S.? Not that she had much choice in the matter. Jobs were scarce after WWII so many in England went abroad to work.
We traveled a lot by ship as I mentioned in a previous post about my early wanderings, so I was thrilled and amused when Andrea unearthed the following children's menu from ship voyages we took in 1953 and 1954 when I was three and four years old. Check out what they were serving children back then. It certainly wasn't chicken nuggets with mac and cheese.
I am trying to picture myself in a little pastel smocked dress and mary jane shoes saying; "I say there, good sir, might I have a wee bit more of the pressed ox tongue? And this strawberry melonge is simply devastating!"
Happy Mother's Day all.
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