The posts have slowed to a crawl on the blog and I thought I better explain why. I have decided to pause on the reconstruction of the family tree and concentrate my efforts on writing up a readable (and hopefully going some way towards publishable) collection of what I refer to as the 'Charles and Emma' letters. Charles was Charles Alfred Atkin, my 2x great uncle (Samuel Atkin's youngest son, and 8th of his 9 children), the chart below makes this clearer! To recap how this all came about: In 2013 while researching my family history I was contacted by a very distant cousin on my maternal side, Jean Harrison, who had wanted to correct me about the captioning of a photograph I had on my ancestry online family tree. After a few messages back and forth it was clear that Jean had a wealth of information and I organized a visit to her home in St Leonards to see what discoveries I might be able to make. One of the most precious of her collections was a folder of over one hundred...