Tracing your Home's History
Jul. 31st, 2010 12:50 pmI'm not sure how I came to possess Tracing your Home's History by Anthony Adolph. It claims to be excerpted for The Times so I suspect it fell out of a relative's paper and was passed on to me because of my interest in genealogy. It's basically, a few grammatical infelicities aside, a perfectly respectable run-down of useful sources for tracing your home's history. However I had high hopes that it would be bonkers and laughably inaccurate after I read the following two sentences in the introduction:
In shows such as Living TV's Most Haunted series, my friend the psychic Derek Acorah* visits buildings all over Britain and uses his paranormal skills to communicate with the spirits of dead inhabitants.
From Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey to A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner, many successful books and films are based around homes and the events that unfold within them.
Sadly the rest of the book was far more prosaic.
*Yes that's the one who got tricked into being possessed by a fictional character and yes, the Introduction was written (or at least published) after that happened.
In shows such as Living TV's Most Haunted series, my friend the psychic Derek Acorah* visits buildings all over Britain and uses his paranormal skills to communicate with the spirits of dead inhabitants.
From Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey to A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner, many successful books and films are based around homes and the events that unfold within them.
Sadly the rest of the book was far more prosaic.
*Yes that's the one who got tricked into being possessed by a fictional character and yes, the Introduction was written (or at least published) after that happened.