3 Buildings that have links to my family

 

I was going into work yesterday morning when I noticed that the War Memorial across the road was being cleaned.  The names on that memorial include my uncle and my great-uncle – one from WW1 and one from WW2.   When I was younger we lived a few houses away from from my grandparents, and I used to pass the memorial on my way home from school.  I grew up hearing the stories about Great Uncle George Henry and Uncle Arthur.  When I started my research one of the first things that I did was to search on the Commonwealth War Graves  site for information about these two relatives.  In my box of treasures I have a funeral ribbon and a newspaper cutting reporting that Great Uncle George Henry was missing presumed dead.  My mum has a letter written by Uncle Arthur from Mombasa – he was a sick-berth attendant on a ship that was sunk in the Indian Ocean.  

~~A story that connects the two of them and the War Memorial ~~

When the memorial was being built my uncle who was about (need to check this)  8 years old, went each day to “help” – my grandma made him his lunch to take, and at the end of the week the workmen made him up his own pay packet with money from their own wages.

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Going further up into the town centre there is the old Co-op building – Shackleton Hall.  The local council has recently renovated this building and are now using part of it as council offices.   I have two old copies of the     Co-op’s magazine which refer to my great grandfather who worked for the Co-op as a carter.

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Next door to Shackleton Hall is the parish church.  According to the blue plaque there has been a church here since the 12th century.  This was not the church where my grandparents were married, and in fact I didn’t think that there was any connection at all to my family, I still haven’t found a link to my maternal grandfather’s family – they moved from west Yorkshire into Colne in the 1880s.  However in the course of my research I discovered that my great(several-times) grandparents – from my paternal grandmother’s family - were married there before settling in North Yorkshire.

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