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31 August 2015

#52Ancestors - Week 35 - School Days

Week 35 (August 27 – September 2) – School Days: Many kids have returned to school by this time. What do you know about your ancestors’ school days? Do you have any yearbooks? Have you found him or her in a local school census? (Certainly nobody knows about any senior pranks they pulled )

This week is probably one of the hardest weeks of the #52Ancestors challenge so far - I haven't found much information about any of the schools my ancestors went to (though I know most of them didn't go much past the legal leaving age - whatever age that was). I know where my mother and her brothers went to school, but that's about it.

Also, we have no photos at all of any ancestors as children - which would be due to the fact that most of them were extremely poor. When you are trying just to earn enough to buy food, there would never be any spare money for such a fanciful thing as a photograph!

A few years ago my cousin Jeannette was surfing the web and she came across the site GlesgaPals.com - a site where people have posted a lot of old school photos from the various schools around Glasgow.

This photo caught her attention - from the Tureen Street School c1945. The Tureen Street School was just a few minutes walk from where the Martin family lived in Moncur Street Glasgow from at least 1937 until about 1961.

The top row of this photo (boy 2nd from the right) we believe is our uncle Eddie Martin - it's potentially the only school photo of any Martin family member. [Update - The benefits of this blog - after a family discussion on facebook, we've now decided that the boy 2nd from the right in the top row is actually our uncle William Martin who was born in 1935 and would have been 10 when this photo was taken]



On the same site, there's another photo, dated from 1957, also at Tureen Street School. The student list includes the name of a boy who I believe is one of our 1st cousins. He was born in 1946 and lived with my/his grandmother in Moncur Street.

This cousin is still alive and well, so I won't share his name, but 2 school photos from all the Martin ancestors in my tree, is a better result than I expected.

When I am in Scotland later this year, I will be quizzing all the cousins to see if they've got any old photos squirrelled away. You never know what might turn up in those old shoe boxes.

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