Family death season

My Dead Family Tree

A brief history of my departed family

When I was growing up, all my friends had large families: four brothers and two sisters. Or five sisters and two brothers, plus a multitude of cousins, in-laws, hangers-on, lackeys and sycophants. Or whatever you want to call the extended family.

Then there were folk who were called aunt and uncle, but weren’t related to anyone. The archetypal ‘Auntie Val’ and ‘Uncle Roger’, who were simply friends of people’s parents.

This is my real aunt and uncle, and my two cousins.

Fine looking people, eh? Sadly my dear aunt Pauline passed away last year, but the rest are still alive.

This guy isn’t.

This is my maternal great-great-grandfather, Henry Weatherhogg, who was born in Lincolnshire (UK) in 1869. And could be a relative of Abe Lincoln. Or perhaps everyone looked like that in those days.

Then the line runs dead, and the next person I find is my maternal grandmother, Rosa. This is her painting a pot — she was a designer.

She married this dude.

Naturally, my grandfather didn’t dress up like this for fun and drive around on an Enfield. This was taken in Algeria during the war.

That’s the Second World War featuring Hitler, Churchill, and Stalin. Not the Gulf War starring Saddam Hussein, George Bush and Joseph Goebbels — sorry, I meant Donald Rumsfeld…

I have only two photos of this period. This is the other one: an orange seller in Algeria.

The fold in the print looks like the horse is growing another head, not that the seller seems to mind. He looks so cool that in another life he’d probably end up as an Instagram Influencer for Algerian oranges.

Or pigeons.

This was my grandfather (the one from Algeria) in later life.

He’s in the middle with the pigeon on his head. The woman next to him isn’t my grandmother, but I can assume she’s taking the photo. Maybe?

These are my other grandparents. This was taken in South Africa where they were visiting their daughter— my Auntie Pauline (see above).

Needless to say, all my grandparents, and the Algerian orange seller (I would imagine), are dead.

So are these folk.

These are my parents. My mother died in 1982 and my father in 2022.

I was kind of annoyed as I thought it was normal for one parent to die shortly after the other, like my grandparents. I had to wait forty years from one funeral to the next. Talk about dragging it out…

And that’s the end of the line for me (no pun intended). My family is very small, and now most of them are dead.

I doubt this article will make it onto ancestry.com as it’s probably one of the vaguest family trees ever constructed. Simply a smattering of dead family members dressed up as a Medium piece. But as my dead grandfather said, we’ve all got to make our money somehow. Too right!

So to finish, here’s a picture of me aged 16 in Norway. And if that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is.

P.S. I’m not cold!

Thanks for ploughing through my dead family, and thanks to Grimsby Hackney for getting me to write this as he told me that my previous story was too boring. So for more laughs read Grimsby Hackney, or my stuff (which is better) below:

More insanity?