3 November 2008

I hate my smoke detector

Ok, so I understand why we have smoke detectors. I tested mine a couple of weeks ago - well, the toaster set it off, but it was as good as a test. And then, early this morning, it started to beep. That beep which it uses to tell you that its battery needs changing.

My question is this - why, oh why, does the smoke detector NEVER run down during the day? It's always, always in the middle of the night! WHY???

Rant over, back to the family history.

The ancestor most in my mind at the moment is my great-grandfather George Staden. He was born in St Ives at the end of September 1873, the youngest of four children of George & Sarah, nee Carter. Sarah died four weeks later of consumption. Fairly unsurprisingly, George suffered with Tuberculosis (consumption by another name) all through his life.

He was apprenticed to a draper by the age of 17, working in Cambridge and Ware and married my great-grandmother in Cambridge in 1901. They had two children; first a daughter, my grandmother, and then a son who sadly died before his second birthday.

As the TB took hold, George became a patient at The Colony in Papworth. In October 1920, at the age of just 46, he died at Papworth. His photograph stands proudly to the left.



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