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<\/a> ready for us, but we dropped our bags and had lunch on the terrace looking out from a vantage point about halfway up a hill.\u00a0 Then we wandered up High Street a little and lastly went looking for a garden for my sister.\u00a0 (I wanted family history and she wanted plants and gardens, so we did as much of both as we could pack in.)\u00a0 The garden we found was lovely and had many visitors, including groups of schoolchildren working off the energy they\u2019d had to contain all day.\u00a0 They were running around, jumping off walls and benches, fighting each other with long grass stems and generally having a good time.\u00a0 Fun to watch.<\/p>\nThe next morning we got ourselves back down to the train station which was where we\u2019d arranged to meet up with the cousins.\u00a0 They had graciously offered to come pick us up, take us back to their house for the morning to talk and then to lunch and over to Ditchling.\u00a0 This is a Denman cousin I had connected with more than a year ago through this blog and then via a letter I wrote to the Ditchling church our ancestors belonged to.\u00a0 Yes, my posts do occasionally attract a cousin\u2019s attention; and yes, I actually wrote a paper letter to England (because I couldn\u2019t find any other contact information for the Old Meeting House).\u00a0 Serendipity at it\u2019s best!<\/p>\n
My newly-found Denman cousin is interested in the family history too, and we have a wonderful ongoing correspondence via email about our interests and what we are finding.\u00a0 Unfortunately we have not yet been able to connect our two family lines definitely.\u00a0 Both of us go back to a Denman man born in the mid-1700s (William b. 1763 in Ditchling and Michael b. c. 1750) in Sussex.\u00a0 Although my line through William has been said to go back a number of generations in Sussex, there is no solid documentation for the relationship between him and the couple said to be his parents.\u00a0 For my cousin\u2019s line, Michael has so far as well resisted all efforts to find\/document parents for him.<\/p>\n
We spent the morning sitting around her table, talking about family trees and evidence found or not found, and looking at what we each had to share.\u00a0 She of course had much more than I did, since I had pared down what I felt I could carry on planes and buses and trains.\u00a0 And she had very kindly printed and copied a number of pages and trees for me and put all in a large envelope and a mailing tube\u00a0 I could carry in my suitcase, we hoped.\u00a0 While she and I were busy with this talk, my sister and her husband were getting to know each other and my sister got to hear about his interests and also to ask about his family.<\/p>\n
Almost enough good food to make me want an afternoon nap, except that we were heading to Ditchling to meet Mrs. Leonard Maguire and also another Denman researcher, and to see the Old Meeting House and some of Mr. Maguire\u2019s papers that his widow still holds.\u00a0 He was a thorough and prolific researcher who started out with a historic interest in the Baptists and developed genealogical interests in some of the families of the Old Meeting House along the way. With this all to look forward to I couldn\u2019t have napped if you paid me to!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The beginning of our second week in England we moved on from Hythe to Lewes.\u00a0 This put us in a lovely historic small town in the South Downs in East Sussex.\u00a0 It has a castle and lots of old buildings.\u00a0\u00a0 …<\/p>\n<\/a>At lunch time we went out to a restaurant\u00a0 and got help deciphering the menu.\u00a0 There was a discussion about what a Pimm\u2019s Cup <\/a>was \u2013 that included the waitress \u2013 and we decided to try one for the table since none of us had ever tasted one.\u00a0 And at dessert time my sister and I were introduced to Eton Mess<\/a> which is absolutely delicious and which was more than I should have finished with.<\/p>\n