Wander(ing) on the “Go” & Visiting the Past

There are places you never expect you’ll ever visit, mountain peaks and ocean depths and all the far corners in between. Places I certainly never expected to travel on a whim. But thanks to an Oculus Go headset and an app called “Wander” now all I need is a comfy chair and WiFi to be at home anywhere in the entire world –effortlessly touring the collective work that is Google Map’s gift to all, one moment amidst penguins in Antarctica, the next the ruins of Pompeii. 

While satisfing their curiosities with famous places, it seems most people seek out their own addresses to see their homes as others see them. But I thought of another address, too, one as familiar as the family photo album. 39 Ramsden Street, Barrow-in-Furness, England. The place from where our family tree grew, branched and eventually straddled an ocean. It couldn’t still be there could it, not after 80 years? It was as easy as speaking the address out loud to look it up. To virtually be in the street where my grandmother had played as a child. 

There it was, the little stone rowhouse from whose rooftop my family watched Hailey’s comet streak across the sky in 1910 (my Gram fell asleep).  I knew without even going back to find our last photo of it from 1937 that this was it, different but the same. It was as if one could turn a corner and be transported in time. 

I couldn’t see into the back garden but I knew what it would be like, a little dooryard with a stone fence.  

I couldn’t resist exploring further, turning corners and following streets at random. Here was the town’s hall still just as proud a landmark. Yes, just like our last photo of it.

And there was the church where my Great Uncle John had been one of the “Saint George’s Boys.” 

Second kid down on the left at the end. (He grew up to be the engineer who designed the steering-wheel-linked headlight that still can be seen in use on the cop cars that careen through the noir of old gangster movies.)

Across the square from the church was the “Railwaymen’s Club” at the station where my Great Grandfather Aaron proudly received an award for his service on the line. 

This sailor from a tall ship came across a lady in distress whose carriage had broken an axle on a country road. 

He never went to sea again and they lived on Ramsden Street the rest of their lives together. The kind gentleman made a family with her and became the kindest, most loving, of fathers. It was the photographer by the way who gave him the two left feet pictured below.

Before the youngest children had grown, the eldest daughters became maids, then housekeepers at Edwardian houses not unlike those of “Downton Abby” fame. They helped to support the household, coming home only rarely for holidays. How my Grandmother Sevena (so named because she was the seventh daughter of a seventh son, seated above on her father's lap) missed her big sisters. 

Those sisters would never all reunite again under the same roof, not until all of them had made their own homes and families in the new world. My world across the sea.