Lest We Forget: Commando Memorial at Spean Bridge

My cousin Simon (Hamish’s brother) stopped at the Commando Memorial at Spean Bridge on his way back home from North Uist (outer Hebrides) in late August. He took the photographs below that includes the following plaque remembering those who died during Operation Herrick in Afghanistan, which lists my nephew Sam Alexander (see Wiki entry):

More photos of Huncoat Hall

David Birtwistle has kindly shared a few photos of Huncoat Hall below from his visit to local area with his wife back in May 2004:

David also sent the following links with more information about the hall. These include the listing on the Historic England site for Huncoat Hall and Attached Barn (Grade II Listed Building) with the following details:

Huncoat Hall

This chapter was originally published in Thirty–one Generations of the Birtwhistle Family: A Family History (2006) compiled by L. Alan Birtwhistle, who has given us kind permission to share it here along with other chapters from the book that we’ll be publishing over the coming months.

Alan’s book also included a CD supplement that contained a family tree file with details of many Birtwhistle and other spellings of family members from 1160 A.D. That tree continues to be updated on this site thanks to Hamish Maclaren with kind help from Alan and others collaborating with them.

You can read about how to best search the family tree on this site and where else it can be accessed here, in article about the Birtwistle family that contains links to other sources.

Generation 5: Paternal 3x Gt. Grandparents…

In theory, there should be 32 ancestors in this generation, but two ancestors (Fitzherbert and Mary Wright) in the last generation were siblings so shared the same parents. And we can’t confirm the natural father of our great grandmother Annie Birtwistle (née Hartley), so that branch is currently a dead end. That means we not only have a duplicate pair of ancestors at this generation, but also a missing pair.  And so there are actually only 28 possible ancestors we can currently trace in this generation.

Generations 4 (maternal branches): Biographies, Obituaries, etc

This is part 3 of my housekeeping, where I am going through each generation of ancestors to see where there are ancestry dead ends, how much information we have about each ancestor, etc. Previous posts include:

• Generation 1-3
• Generation 4: Paternal 2x Gt. Grandparents