Thursday, 23 August 2007

A weekend...

Saturday 19 August 2007
Dan and Lauren offered to drive me around Manchester and surrounds to search for some addresses from some ancestors. This was my first experience of tracing locations, and whilst we didn't find what we were looking for, I did learn a lot!

First stop, lunch but before that, we had to pick up dessert! We went to a place called Slattery's Patissier and Chocolatier - the most amazing chocolate and cake shop I have ever seen. You can check them out
here. They have large windows into the kitchen where you can watching them creating their cakes. They even run courses. I managed to take a couple of photographs from outside, although they really don't give the cakes justice, I had to try and capture some of the amazing works of art.


The shop was filled with cakes, chocolates and pies! We each bought 1 thing for dessert, I was very controlled - coming home with just one chocolate.

Next, we tried a new organic food resturant for lunch, eggs on a bagel filled me up with just enough room for the Slattery chocolate!

Ok, so time to try and find those addresses. The most difficult aspect was trying to understand exactly where the various locations were. I had the addresses from various census, and the church from marriage certificate but 150 + years is a long time and most of the villages are no longer identifiable. Most of the villages or towns have been absorbed by Bolton. We did find the locations of many places but the church was pulled down 15 years ago and replaced with the ugliest building you have ever seen. The houses were gone, some replaced with early 20th century building or some just rubble.

What I learnt today? Library first, find a map of the area in the era, learn about the history of the area, idenitfy the places and the people and their stories, then go exploring!

Sunday 20th August
A quiet day at home - well maybe not so quiet. Manchester City was playing Manchester United in the football (we call it soccer) - a big local game with different members of the family going for different sides. Dan and Lauren support United, which is good, as it is the team I had heard of - although I like the blue ties of city officials (shhh don't tell Lauren!). United lost and I still don't get soccer! 90 minutes for 1 point !?!

Anyway, that was the weekend in Manchester.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just the name of that cake shop had me drooling. Sounds yummo. Love what I can see of the cakes in the picture. Very creative.