Motherwell Heritage Centre

Not that I’d be encouraging staff absences, but it’s just great to be able to take a class for a day. I don’t get to do it often enough. Today however I got to take P7 out on a trip to the Motherwell Heritage Centre. Their trip was about WWII. The staff there were brillant, running workshops all day – drama, dressing up, a speaker who went to school during the war, an activity workbook etc. I had a ball! We even got into a real Anderson Shelter in the museum part of the centre.

Meantime in the world outside of school I’ve been investigating my family tree. There’s a clear family trait of being thirsty to find out about the world. Shipmasters on one side going back to the Napoleonic wars and a diary of captaining a ship during this time! A captain sailing people to Quebec during the potato famines, newspaper clippings of rescues at sea in the 1800s by my great great great grandad Talbot, an odd range of inventors down several lines (removing each others teeth and screwing them back in, or inventing safety catches for train doors!!!)….. And one poor soul who had delusions of grandeur and insisted he had been unfairly treated by all and sundry who had stolen his (imaginery) immense wealth – delusions brought on it seems from his carousing of ladies in 19th century ports around the world….. The incredible thing is seeing how far and wide the families in each line, quickly spread out throughout the world during the 19th and early 20th centuries – Canada, the States, various parts of New Zealand and Australia and China.

Seems to me that pre internet times this movement and flow of people in my family is the way they connected and discovered new places and knowledge. They used the sea as their pre web connection. It took a bit longer but in many ways was no different to how many ICT tools work for us now.