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Anyone can tell a love story. About how they or someone they knew met, fell in love, married, and lived happily ever after.
But how many can say their marriage was the very first to be held in their local church?
That's something my great-uncle Jack and his wife Mary were able to lay claim to.
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Thankfully not at war with each other, although I'm sure there've been quite a few domestic barnies over the years! As with any family, there are various ancestors of mine that I'm aware were involved with the military.
I'll be honest, I don't really know that much about any of their stories but I've taken the time to research as many of them as possible just for this article.
Let's start with my paternal grandfather, Bob.
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For this post I thought I'd start by taking a dive into the data sitting in the genealogy software I use.
One piece of data that's commonly collected - from census returns to birth records - is an occupation. The individual's occupation, their parents' occupations, sometimes who they work for. All of that is stored in my family tree database and some of them are a little bit interesting.
Read more: Interesting occupations, Reading's 3 'B's, and a dairy research institute
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On the first of May 1915, the RMS Lusitania left New York on a return sailing to Liverpool. Unlike many other passenger ships, Lusitania hadn't been called up for frontline duty in World War I. Instead, she was given a grey paint job and kept her regular route between England and the United States, assisting with the war effort by conveying personnel and small arms across the Atlantic.
The atmosphere aboard was probably a little nervous throughout as the Imperial Germany Embassy had placed advertisements alongside those of Cunard's reminding potential passengers that "a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies" - including the waters around Great Britain.
And, whilst the passengers may have felt a little more comfortable knowing they were just off the Irish coast and mere hours away from Liverpool, sadly any concerns they had were to become a reality.
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This week's 52 Ancestors topic of "Surprise!" really couldn't have come at a better time as I was surprised by my family history research just the other day.
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I recently reshared a blog post about my 3x great-grandfather, James Whipp, as part of #52Ancestors. This was in response to the prompt "in the news" and I thought sharing the time when PC Whipp was involved in a case where a pheasant and a hare were thrown out of a brothel window:
Whipp, 86 D, deposed that on Saturday afternoon he saw a great crowd in Shepherd-street [now called Dering Street], Oxford-street, and on going to the spot, ascertained that the defendant had thrown from the first floor of a house of ill fame a hare and a pheasant, which were picked up, and quickly carried off.
Anyway, curiosity got me thinking about how many more articles I could find mentioning him.
Read more: More rifling through the pages of the British Newspaper Archive
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This is something that comes as a surprise to some of my friends - I believe in ghosts. I'm not a religious person; I don't believe in a god, heaven, hell, or anything like that, I'm a man of science, yet I believe that hauntings happen.
I have done from a young age and, as I've got older, that belief hasn't gone away.
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It's sad to see the direction Twitter has taken under its Elon Musk ownership.
I've had a Twitter account since November 2008, when it was about 2½ years old, was all about sharing your moment with short messages and just community building. I loved Twitter. Loved.
Read more: My thoughts about, and my journey on, the bird site
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In 2023 I became one of Hwb Narberth's pub quiz host team. At least once a month you'll find me behind the mic testing the knowledge of Narberth!
Hi, I'm Chris. I run the online shop for one of the UK's largest charities.