When I last wrote, we were headed from Wales into England to join our narrowboat crew in Wolverhampton. But we had a couple of days first and we headed to Dudley, England -- the area where most of Bob's paternal ancestors came from. From our research on ancestors.com, we knew that Bob's grandfather had emigrated from Dudley to Brooklyn, NY in 1895, followed by his wife and young son (Bob's uncle) in 1897. Bob's dad was born in Brooklyn in 1900. We knew where his grandfather lived in Dudley and even the pub they frequented and wanted to do some exploring there.
When we drove into Dudley to go to our hotel, we passed the Black Country Museum and right next to it was the "Dudley Archives", a research center. Just by good fortune, the Archives and the Black Country Museum were both in walking distance from the small hotel we had booked. We got checked in and walked to the Archives -- the people there were really helpful and showed us how to find the right microfilm reels and how to view them. We were able to locate original birth, death and marriage records for some of Bob's relatives, which was really exciting. You have to know the Parish they belonged to to find the records and we only knew that for some so we weren't entirely successful.
The next day we were at the Archives early and spent a lot of time looking at microfilm without any more successes. In retrospect, we should have been driving around the old neighborhood where his family lived. Late in the morning, we had a phone call from our friends Kate and Sally, who were going to share our narrowboat trip with us, and they were already in Wolverhampton (just 3 miles away), so we went and picked them up and then we all went to the Black Country museum.
The Black Country Museum is a fabulous 26 acre "living history" museum in Dudley -- it is an entire village of all kinds of houses, shops, and industrial sites, realistically representing that area from the mid 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century.
Bob especially loved the blacksmith shop and had a long conversation with the blacksmith, who made him a link of chain to take as a souvenir.
There was also a 30 minute tour of a coal mine where you really got a feel for what it must be like to go down into a coal mine and spend the day there in the darkness. Coal mining was a major industry in that area, but Bob's ancestors were all vice and anvil makers. By the way, he of course took more anvil pictures:
The Black Country Museum was really interesting but I found it somewhat depressing. Economic times were really hard and conditions really poor and there was a lot of child labor during that period.
After the Black Country Museum, we all drove up to Wolverhampton and went to Napton Narrowboats to ask some questions about our trip and see what the boats looked like. Then we dropped Kate and Sally at their hotel and went back to ours.
On Sunday, Bob and I drove to Birmingham airport (no easy feat) and dropped off our rental car, then took a train back to Wolverhampton to meet our friends at the Baron's Court Hotel. Rick and Gayle had arrived there that morning and when we arrived, Kate and Sally, Rick and Gayle were sitting at a table in the garden having a wonderful time getting to know each other.
These two couples are both great friends of ours but from different eras of our lives so they had never met and now were planning to embark on a week's journey on a very narrow boat with very little privacy. Luckily, they liked each other immediately.
The Baron's Court Hotel was a small hotel that was delightfully eclectic in its decor. It was the perfect place for the 6 of us to stay and plan our trip as it had a lovely "salon" where we could sit in comfort and chat.
This lady kept us company in the salon. We called her "Victoria".
Sunday evening we planned our grocery list for the boat as well as our route. We went out to dinner Sunday night to an Indian restaurant and shared several dishes.
Had a great time. Monday morning we took a cab to Napton Narrowboats to begin our canal boating adventure.
More about that in my next post.
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