The Chinese Gate, Manchester
China Town in Manchester is not a huge place. It is marked by this lovely gate we passed through on the way to dinner last night and then we had a bit of a pub crawl through ancient pubs. Dinner was fabulous Thai food.
I needed the pick-me-up after my poignant personal trip to Eccles. I had wanted to visit Peel Green Cemetery to find my great grandparents' grave. Luckily, I e-mailed the cemetery and they had quickly found the area and plot number, but we located the plot and there was no headstone. Whether there had ever been anything to mark it was impossible to tell. There were broken urns and small markers in some spots besides the gravestones that sometimes indicated up to 6 occupants. Those were different times. The only information I had at the beginning of my trip was from an old letter that said they were buried in a grave of their own in that cemetery. Now, I have an area and plot number too. Not much, and anticlimactic compared to finding their names.
We had walked around Eccles on another day and located the last house where my grandpa's aunt and uncle had lived. The house where he was raised was probably knocked down to build the tram tracks while the houses on the other side of the street remained intact. I had to wonder what life was like back then, around 120 years ago, and you can look up at old buildings, often with dates on them, and see which were there when he was young and walked in those streets.
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Photos taken with my iPad in Manchester, UK.
@kansuze
We some Chinese gates up the road from where I live. Visiting old cemeteries is always interesting, too
We have some in Ottawa too.
I usually visit the cemetery when I travel. It would extra interesting if an ancestor was there.
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lol - I get my fill of churches and graveyards when I'm on holidays. I have had the experience of standing in a graveyard and literally being related to half the people there, and it's possible I was related to more. It's like staring your family in the face especially when you had met some of them.
My g-grandparents and a great aunt buried with them would have been my closest relatives in England. I knew where they were buried from an old letter written by one of my grandfather's first cousins on his mom's side to us and we lost contact with their families when they died. On his dad's side, I haven't located any records yet and I'm sure they are there but I'm dealing with a very common surname.
Both my grandmothers were born in England as well, so much to figure out.