Visited My Ancestral Village in Somerset, England (Pics)

[Ed Rooney]

During my recent trip to London, I had a day off and decided to drive the two hours out to Somerset, which is where my family resided prior to moving to America in 1873. I am very interested in genealogy, so through family records, Parish records and UK census data, I was able to put figure out what my ancestors did and where they lived from 1770 on. Beyond 1770 is a problem because the parish registers were damaged in the 5 year period when my G-G-G-G-Grandfather was born. But based upon how and where the families lived, I have a few theories about who his parents were.

The funny thing is that last year I was able to use UK BMD records to track down some of my cousins who stayed in England. They live about 40 minutes from the village, but they had no idea we were from Shipham. They just assumed the family had always been Northeast of Bristol.

We left my hotel on Bishopsgate at 7:30am, and arrived in town at 10am. We had to wait a few hours for the pubs to open, during which time we walked around the village snapping pictures, visited the parish church, drove over to Winscombe (some family from there also) and poked around their cemetery. By the time we returned, the pubs were open and we were hungry for lunch. The first pubs was the Miner's Arms, which has been there, virtually unchanged, since my ancestors dug for lead in the hills. We had one or two in there, but it was a hard-drinking Sunday afternoon bunch that didn't seem interested in socializing. Also, they weren't really cooking. Just some sandwich bits laid out for everyone. Their loss.

We decided to head over to the Penscot Inn, which was also around in the old days. There was a good crowd, old and young, looking more like they had just left church. A WWII vet was sipping lemonade as he told stories of the war. We ordered lunch (a bacon Cheddar burger, in honor of the neighboring village of Cheddar where I also had family), and as an icebreaker, I quietly told the bartender to pour everyone a round on my tab. Pretty soon I was chatting with everyone in the place. I had a few more drinks, they had me try some local Thatcher's cider, and we all tried to figure out of we were related.

It was a small village, so we were done sightseeing by 2:30 and drove back to London. Hopefully I will be able to get out there again this summer.

So here are some pics.