Two Cheshire Farming Families from the same village celebrate a wedding in 1958 - St David's Church, Wettenhall

AS IT WAS

This online magazine started as a means of setting out the research that I had been undertaking on my Family History in the period to 2009. 

I had found that trying to consolidate the work in a single word document was clumsy and that the overlaps between the families made it more appealing to develop partially independent story lines.

Working online story by story seemed more sensible and adaptable to the fairly constant revisions that were necessary as the work peaked.

I was also conscious of the need to protect the documents and used the Blogger platform as a means of backing up my files.

Blogging turned out to be the ideal medium for settling out and safeguarding chapters that were constantly amenable to revision.

At the back of my mind though was the possibility of using the exercise as a means of developing competencies in e-publication.

To my surprise, almost immediately, I was contacted by and reunited with distant family members thanks to the visibility provided by the Web. And once I had learned to communicate in the new medium, I had a voice.

So learning how to download material from a DVD and posting the results on YouTube is another extension of the same process – especially as the result tells its own special tale of life, fifty plus years ago, in the dairy farming village where I grew up.

The material started as an 8 mm home movie and has gone through several transformations before finally finding a home online.

The Video shows the wedding of my sister Susan Davina Johnson to John Hollinshead. We farmed at Corner Farm, Wettenhall and the Hollinsheads farmed at Woodside, Wettenhall, Cheshire. Sue was ‘given away’ by my stepfather Horace Darlington and sections of the film show the bride and groom, and the two sets of parents – Fred and Flo Hollinshead and Horace and Meg Darlington.

There are also fairly numerous family representatives from both families and a gathering of onlookers from the village.

I was a 14 year-old usher who guided the guests to their assigned places on the bride or groom’s side of the church and who opened and closed car doors for the important participants.

The film also shows folk arriving for the Reception at the Bowmere Country Club in Tarporley.