Last month’s voice cloning of my mom’s autobiography inspired me to collect all the genealogy files that Dad collected and put them online. Lots of fun stuff: autobiographies, memoirs, slideshows, family trees, and other misc. documents:
https://brucewinter.net/photos/genealogy
One of the many interesting things I learned was details about our 5 x great uncle William Winter who was hung for a bungled burglary. Dad found a transcript of the trial from 1791 and I dug up a video about the Winter Gibbet . A gibbet is gallows where a body is hung on public display until it rots away. This is the reconstructed Winter Gibbet, one of the last still standing in England:
This is not his original head 🙂
I added some fun lighting to my TV, backlighting to the back of the TV and some artsy lighting above it. It uses a small camera pointed at the TV to make the lighting respond to the lighting of the show:
Sister Sue’s daughter, Mikaylie, got married in large wedding in a very remote village of Sumatra:
Zach and Liz continue to explore the beautiful WA mountains:
I’m exploring new recipes with Hello Fresh:
Closing with some bugs, shrooms, and artsy photo of a crepe myrtle bark cowboy riding a doughnut while nibbling on a micro earth:
Bruce
You have great fantasy !
Thanks Ben! Sometimes fantasy land is a better place to hang out 🙂
I remember Dad finding Williams history and was a bit concerned about a criminal as a relative. Lol Great research Bruce. So cool to have an actual historical story and to see where it all happened!!
I remember Dad finding Williams history and was a bit concerned about a criminal as a relative. Lol Great research Bruce. So cool to have an actual historical story and to see where it all happened!!
Yeah, some criminal heritage there, kind of like an anti-Dad. I found the last section from that first link interesting:
—
Winter appeared to have served previous sentences including stealing in Hexham and Newcastle; it was said that ‘he [had] not been at liberty six months together during the last eighteen years’.
The Leeds Intelligencer newspaper (amongst others) reported that his father and brother were hanged at Morpeth in 1790 alluring that this familial pattern was the root cause of William’s behaviour. It is possible that newspaper got the year wrong. In August 1788 John and Robert Winter, father and son, were executed at Fair Moor, Morpeth for breaking into Hesleyside House, the home of William Charlton and stealing a silver tankard. Other reports refer to Robert and John Winter as being horse stealers and were executed for stealing a bay mare worth £10 in the parish of St. John Lee.
At the execution, the son addressed the spectators recommending that they paid attention to their ‘duties of religion’ especially the Sabbath; he had turned towards evil and a life of vice from a young age as he had been brought up ‘without any regard to morality’. This last-minute speech did not change the outcome either man faced, and both seemed resigned to their fate.
Even better than being on a prison ship during the War of 1812
Interesting reference! I had to look that one up:
There was a shortage of prison accommodation in the Victorian era, so long-term prisoners were transferred to provincial prisons, or to the dreaded hulks. The hulks were decommissioned warships anchored in the mud off Woolwich. They were dark, damp and verminous and few prisoners managed to escape