For the last two years or so I have been looking for a chance to get down to London and plunder the archives there, as well as visit a few places that crop up in my Dad's family tree. In mid-October we decided that I could get away for the second week of December and I booked train tickets and accommodation for the 11th to the 15th December.
Top of the to-do list is to try to locate my Grandfather's grave in Tower Hamlets Cemetery. My Dad remembers there being a gravestone, suggesting that it was a private grave and the guidance at the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery webpage suggested I would be highly likely to find records and a map at London Metropolitan Archive . Then Murphy's Law struck as I discovered that the LMA is closed for building work until 21st January. Fortunately their enquiry service is still operating, so I decided to invest £35 in it. Let's hope that it bears fruit - before the 10th of December!
The second blow struck yesterday, when I went to the National Archives website to add to my list of catalogue reference codes of interesting documents and discovered that it, too, will be closed in the first half of December. I was intensely disappointed but, with hindsight, there is nothing vital that I need from there at the moment, only a lot of documents that might be of interest and that it would have been useful to have a look at without ordering copies 'blind'.
One of the ways I will make up for it is by visiting the London Probate Department and looking to see if any of my less poverty-stricken ancestors left wills. Another place that looks like it will be worth a visit is the Local Studies Centre at Valence House Museum in Dagenham, where it seems I should be able to find out a bit more about Barking fishermen, as well as look through school records to see if any of my Wills, Garnells or Chambers appear. It might be interesting to read through the local papers from around 1900, the time when my ancestors there seem to have had a depressingly high rate of infant mortality.
