This is how my six year old son regarded our visit to a charity bookfair at the weekend. When I mentioned the bookfair my son groaned, my other half said ‘we had better not be there forever’ and my 4 year old daughter was as excited about it as I was.
Well, the result of the visit was that my son rolled around the floor the whole time, my other half walked away with a huge pile of books in his arms, my daughter found a great activity book and I found some great historical books. That’s a success I reckon!
The first book I found was ‘Celebrity Family Trees‘ written by Ed Wright. I felt this was very topical at the moment since we are watching the celebrity programme ‘So who do you think you are? every Sunday. I have been watching the American series which included Sarah Jessica Parker and her connections to the awful time in history of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. In the Australian series with the amusing episode of Maggie Beer and her bigamist ancestor. Both have been as fascinating as the each other.
This is a great read covering notorious celebrities from Napoleon Bonaparte to Roald Dahl. I previously knew very little about Napolean apart from what I had seen in old movies and yet this week his name keeps popping up. I have just come across this information about Napoleon and his view of Jersey:
“France can no longer tolerate this nest of brigands and assassins. Europe must be purged of these vermin. Jersey is England’s shame”.
Apparently in 1804, Napoleon collected 130,000 men, 15,000 horses and 600 guns at the port of Boulogne to invade England. Jersey was the top of Napoleon’s targets! I hadn’t read about any of this before and am finding it all very interesting. The amusing thing is, that Napoleon was a disciplined and ambitious leader who must have felt quite frustrated at having such indisciplined women in the family, especially his sister!
The other book I found was ‘My side of the story – THE PLAGUE‘ written by Philip Wooderson. It is written from two different characters points of view about the events in this time in history which I am looking forward to reading more about.
Philip Wooderson seems to have done quite a few books in this method, starting with one character on one side of the book, then you have to flip it over and turn it upside down to read the other side of the story. I like that.
My Channel Island Ancestry 