I’m visiting my mother this weekend and have been asked to sort through piles of stuff. In amongst it I found a file of papers on family history. Most of it is unremarkable, but I did find two things worth noting.

The first is an old photo album dating from not long after WWII when my parents had first met. It includes a couple of pictures of my mother at work in a local power station, where she was employed as a chemist. Girl scientists FTW!

The other is a bit of family tree, from which I note that in 1699 an ancestor of mine married a Miss Prudence Blackmore. Of course I know nothing about this lady, so I only speculate. And it is true that “moor” is an old English word for a peat bog. In Devon we have Dartmoor and Exmoor, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a Blackmoor too. But Black Moor has other connotations too, as anyone who has seen Othello should know. So it is just possible that I might have a bit of African ancestry, which would be very cool indeed.