Cherish the daily encounters of our ordinary lives

Se days our little Family His-

- Hilton Dawson

SOME days our little Family History Project can make you feel like a fortune teller from the ‘Hoppings.

Cross our collective palms with (very little silver) and we'll take you back instead of forward and find your family ancestors living out their lives in the little corners of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea.

Some days there’s enough documents and shared understanding to place your folk at a particular moment, amongst some we already know, in familiar circumstances and places.

Then we can wonder what they were really like and imagine meetings and conversations, on those summer days of more than a century ago.

This week a family gathered themselves from various places, then armed with memories of family, who may have been in Newbiggin at some point, sat with us to discover what we knew.

We found them all. Back in 1911, some of them living in Benwell, working in the pits. Later that year, a school admission marks a first mention in Newbiggin, more births, some new family members indelibly associated with the village.

Then, in the great and rather glorious 1921 census there they all are.

Father employed in the long defunct, almost-disappeared Newbiggin Coal Company, mother and three older daughters working from the confectioner’s shop, that upstairs was also home to parents, now eight children, the odd visiting uncle and a lodger.