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, aunts and uncles.
I didn’t have any of these.
I was an only child and had one aunt: my dad’s sister.
Here she is below with her husband and her children — my cousins.
This was taken in South Africa in the late seventies at the height of Apartheid, where they lived in a nice big house.
I used to visit in the 1980s and always wondered why in the local park, there was a sign on the toilet saying:
Whites only
Inside, the toilet was clean and fresh. Around the back was a hole in the ground. That was my first introduction to the injustices of the world, and I’ll never forget it.
My aunt passed away a few years ago, but the rest are still alive.
This guy isn’t.
This is my maternal great-great-grandfather, Francis Weatherhogg, who was born in Willoughton, Lincolnshire (UK) in 1869.
Fine-looking man, isn’t he?
He was a saddler; a very respectable profession in those days. He died in 1911 and left behind four children.
This is one of them.
This is Mary Weatherhogg, my great-grandmother, who became Mary Peasgood when she married Dennis Peasgood. They had one daughter, Rosa — my grandmother.
This is her in the 1960s.
Fine-looking woman, isn’t she?
She married my grandfather, Cyril Brewins, who fought in the Sixth Army in World War II. This is a photograph of him and his friends shortly after signing up for the war.
He’s in the middle. He came back.
Four of them didn’t.
This is him again.
This time in action in Algeria.
Here’s another in Algeria: an orange seller taken by my grandfather, who was an amateur photographer.
Or so he said.
The seller looks pretty cool, doesn’t he? Today, he would be an Instagram Influencer for Algerian oranges.
Or pigeons.
This was my grandfather in London in the 1970s.
He’s the one with the pigeon on his head. The woman next to him on the right isn’t my grandmother. I assume she’s taking the photo.
But I can’t be sure.
These are my paternal grandparents visiting their daughter (my aunt) in that nice big house in South Africa you saw before.
They used to have a housemaid and a gardener.
Neither were allowed in the pool. Like the hole in the ground in the park, I found this unfair.
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 had to wait forty years from one funeral to the next. Talk about dragging it out.
Now there’s just me left.
This was me last year in Paris enjoying the view.
I was 50 in that photo. I’m 51 now.
Not dead.
Not yet.
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I'm already planning my comeback. I might become a zombie.