{"id":67480,"date":"2024-04-21T17:43:51","date_gmt":"2024-04-21T22:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67480"},"modified":"2024-04-21T17:43:51","modified_gmt":"2024-04-21T22:43:51","slug":"among-the-ancestors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67480","title":{"rendered":"Among the ancestors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Among the ancestors<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n

Note to Substack readers. I replicate the essays that I publish on my\u00a0chrissmaje.com<\/a>\u00a0site here on Substack. I\u2019ve switched comments off here because I don\u2019t want to juggle two parallel conversation threads, but if you\u2019d like to discuss my essays feel free to join the conversation over on my website. Currently, all my content is free, but if you\u2019d care to support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack, I\u2019d be super appreciative!<\/em><\/p>\n

I mentioned in a recent post that my mother died at the end of last year. This has imposed a certain amount of emotional and bureaucratic labour on me \u2013 one reason why I\u2019ve been a bit less active on \u00a0this blog of late. But now that she\u2019s with the ancestors, I want to write something about ancestral connection in present times, taking my mother\u2019s life as my starting point.<\/p>\n

My mother was the eleventh and youngest child of Mary and James. James spent his working life as a coalminer in South Yorkshire. His great grandfather, John, was born in 1799 and farmed eight acres near Aberdeen \u2013 the last of my direct ancestors to my knowledge who worked primarily on the land. Mary\u2019s father died in the\u00a0Peckfield Colliery Disaster<\/a>\u00a0of 1896 when she was a month old. His name was William Sheldon. You can read about him\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Wikipedia entry about the disaster doesn\u2019t mention this and I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s true, but a story handed down to me from my mother is that the colliery owners paid off the widows of the dead men up to the point in their shift when they were killed, and then left them to pick up the pieces (though it seems they stumped up 5% of the relief money later collected for the families. Thanks guys).<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among the ancestors Note to Substack readers. I replicate the essays that I publish on my\u00a0chrissmaje.com\u00a0site here on Substack. I\u2019ve switched comments off here because I don\u2019t want to juggle two parallel conversation threads, but if you\u2019d like to discuss my essays feel free to join the conversation over on my website. Currently, all my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15683,150,9738],"class_list":["post-67480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-chris-smaje","tag-collapse","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67481,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67480\/revisions\/67481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}