It's A Boy!

We just watched a bit of the live coverage on the BBC.  The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are now the parents of a baby boy.  I wonder how many extra issues of newspapers will be sold tomorrow?  I'll take a photo or two of the front pages.

This morning we set off from King's Cross on the 8:03am Eastern service to Wakefield.  This is the Full English Breakfast Mom and I enjoyed as we watched the countryside go by. 

Our destination today was the Yorkshire town of Wakefield.

One of the first things I saw upon arriving was this 'crochet bomb".

On my paternal side, I can trace back family several generations to the Wakefield area.  My great great grandparents had a bakery and confectionery shop on Kirkgate near the cathedral.

I spent several productive hours at the Wakefield branch of the West Riding Archives looking at Deed Registers.  My family had property transactions with the Duke of Leeds! 

And here's the cathedral.  It's hard to get a good photo as it is surrounded first by trees, then by shops.

The 247 foot spire is the most dominate feature and makes it the tallest church in Yorkshire.

Construction of this building began in 1150, and drug on in fits and starts until 1440. The ceilings are eye-popping and all date back to the 15th century.  

The five bay quire contains 25 magnificent stalls with misericords and carved animals. It was paid for by Sir Thomas Savil in 1482 in celebration of his marriage to Margaret Bosworth.  I hope they had a long and happy marriage. The collage (2 below) has a photo of one of the carved animals.

Lovely.

If you look closely at the collage you can see that Queen Elizabeth visited for a Maundy service in 2005. 

It was moving to walk about the cathedral knowing that generations of my family were baptised and married here.

By the beginning of the 19th century, most of the members of my 'Wakefield Folk' lived in the village of Stanley. They would have worshipped at St. Peters after it was consecrated in 1824.

My people were mostly stone masons and lived on a winding lane called Bottom Boat. 

There was a ferry across the Calder near Bottom Boat.  My stone mason relatives would have appreciated easy access to water and transportation of their stonework.

Bottom Boat and Lane's End made for a rough and tumble area.  Historically it was populated mostly by miners who worked in the nearby collieries. Even now it still appears to be very much a blue-collar neighborhood.