An unexpected visit

An extraordinary thing happened today. I was finishing lunch, noting that I had ten minutes' grace before an appointment, when the bell rang. A dripping wet man (it was pouring outside) informed Mr PB that he was a relative of mine. And it turned out that he was a second cousin I never knew existed, a second cousin who lives in Dumfries and who had taken buses all the way to Dunoon to find me after reading the blog I created from my father's wartime letters. How did he know where to find me? He'd scouted around my other blog, found I lived in Dunoon, and had asked people in the street. 

He left me with scanned sheets of family tree (you can just see the corner of one in the photo) and an extraordinary book : History of the United Co-Operative Baking Society Ltd, A Fifty Years' Record, 1869-1919. That's where the photo comes from - that bearded gentleman (top left) is Daniel H. Gerrard, JP, who was President of the Society for many years, and he's my great-grandfather. 

The family tree is full of variations on his name; my own father's name was Daniel Harper Gerrard Findlay and we knew that they were family names, as we also knew that his grandfather had been on the Maryhill School Board and had patrolled the area in a lum hat looking out for truants. The book describes him as "one of the best-known figures in the Co-operative Movement". 

Suddenly a whole new scope for ancestral burrowing has landed on my doorstep. I shall doubtless return to it on my blog, but for today's blip I merely share the extraordinary fact of meeting an unexpected cousin on my doorstep in the rain.