A Day In Ringwood & Burley - Visiting A Long Lost Cousin In The New Forest

Today we were off to Ringwood and Burley in the morning to visit with Ann H, my 1st cousin once-removed (I can never get this relationship bit straightened away).  Anne H. is my mother's cousin and Dawn and I were going to take a trip from Dorchester over to Ringwood and into the middle of the New Forest, created back in 1079 when William The Conqueror named the area his "new hunting forest".  

Problem was I had left my travel plug at the B&B in Sheringham and I wasn't able to recharge the batteries in my baby laptop or even plug it in.  So the first order of business was to find a shop that sold a travel plug that would fit a 3-prong North American 110-volt plug so that I could plug it into a 240-volt English wall socket.  We drove into the middle of Dorchester to a small computer shop.  Walking in, I said that I had a challenge for them holding up my 3-prong North American plug.  The response from the young lad in the shop was to pull the North American cord from my transformer, walk over to the wall and pick a 3-prong 240-volt British plug, plug it into the transformer and ask for £8.99.  In and out in less than 10 minutes.

It was a quick 45 minute drive over to Ringwood arriving at 11:15 where Ann was waiting for us outside the Maestro coffee shop where we last had had coffee in August of 2008.  She looked quite good in spite of the fact that she is fighting lung cancer.  After hugs, introductions and greetings, we sat down at the coffee shop along the way as Maestro's was full of people.  We sat for the next 1 1/2 hours catching up on the news and discussing the Bicknell family.  I picked up a ton of information on my relatives which filled in a lot of missing gaps in the family history.  By way of explanation, my mother was a Bicknell.  She hardly ever knew her aunts and uncles even though they lived in Oxted, only 5 miles from where she and her parents lived in Woldingham, Surrey.  (That's Dawn, me, and Ann in the photo below.)

At 12:45, I suggested we return to Burley, a small viillage located in the middle of the New Forest where Ann lives to have lunch at her local pub.  We sat and continued our chat for the next 1 1/2 hour as I listened, asked questions, and picked up lots more information.  We then returned to Ann's place where we browsed through the family photo albums that she had inherited from her mother.

What a treasure trove of photos!!  Here were photos of my grandfather, Private Albert Bicknell at a young 20 years of age somewhere in France in 1914 at the beginning of World War I.  I had one of those photos but here was another one taken the same day in the same location.

The information on the back of these photos was invaluable in determining the place and date of the photos.  Then we came to the photos of my great-grandparents, a young Rowe and Mary Ann Bicknell with two young boys standing in front and a young baby in arms.  Later that evening back in Dorchester, and accessing my Ancestry.co.uk website, I was able to date the photos as around 1898 and the youngest of the two boys (the one on the right) had to be my grandfather who was born in 1895!!  (The guy with the beard is a boarder.) 

There was even an earlier photo that looked like by great-grandfather when he served in India, a fact I didn't even know.  On the back of a photo of Job Bicknell (who had immigrated to Collingwood, Ontario some time in the 1920s)  I saw writing that closely resembled that of my mother's.  What a shock!!

Ann was kind enough to loan me the photo album for me to scan when I get back home so that I can take a closer look at these photos and to make comparisons.  Dawn and I are off tomorrow with her friend, Terry, to travel the West Somerset steam railway from Taunton (Bishops Lideard) to Minehead.

It should be quite a day tomorrow!