Day 8 Sunderland England Friday 6th July 2012

As usual I woke at 5.00 am and tried to be quiet so as not to wake Mary. I crept out of our room upstairs in this fabulous Victoria B&B and went down to the dining room. It was raining outside and when I looked outside it wasn't just raining it was as if a bucket was above the house and sheets of water were pouring down, OMG I had never seen such rain. Apparently England received a month's worth of rain in one evening! Mary arrived down in the dining room at 8.00 am and we decided we would drive 30 minutes to the Newcastle Records Office. When we arrived at the records office we were overwhelmed at the shear size and architecture of this buiding. This massive building was originally a Co-Op something like a supermaket. That's one super dooper size supermarket!

It turned out to be a fantastic decision as we had a great day researching and my head is spinning filled with new information about our John. When John died in 1880 he owned 6 properties in the Sunderland city centre area and amazingly 4 are still standing and we were able to take photos of them. We discovered that John's father in law James Westness was from Sanday, Orkney off the northern coast of Scotland and his occupation was a Master Mariner otherwise known as a ship's captain. John's wife Margaret was an only daughter and John and Margaret had only one son, James Henry McGuigan who died age 24 years, two months before John himself in 1880 - what a tragedy for Margaret to lose both her husband and only son so suddenly. James Henry died of liver failure and John himself from a stroke age 56 years. Son, James Henry was married at the time of his death and his wife, Mary Ord was pregnant and gave birth to a son, James Henry McGuigan 2nd, THE FANCY DRAPER from the advertisement we found yesterday only a month after her husband's death. J. H. McGuigan, The Fancy draper had three children Wilfred, Mary Jane and Gerald that we could find on the records. Wildred died at 16 years of age and Mary Jane at 10 years. We could trace Gerald to 1940 when he got married but after that it is a dead end. Gerald was a Merchant Seaman in 1940 so would have been serving in the second world war. Sadly we could not discover any of John's living descendants at this stage but who knows what the future holds.

This photo is of 27 and 28 Athol Road Sunderland, two of the six properties John owned in 1880.

We had to leave the records office by 3pm in time to return to the Bishopwearmouth cemetery to clean up John's grave and have our little service of burying the stones from Melbourne and Maghera. Because of the rain overnight the grave had turned to MUD! So imagine this, there we were digging in the mud trying very hard not to get it all over us in between laughing at each other's digging efforts. Our shoes and jeans were splattered with mud and we looked like something off Time Team (for those who don't know what Time Team is - it's a program on Foxtel hosted by Tony Robinson where they go on all sorts of archaeological digs in the UK). We cleaned up the gravestone and it came up a treat and we could see the reason why it was in such great condition because it was made of lovely grey granite.We gathered some stones from John's grave to take to Maghera and back to Melbourne to complete the circle of bringing them all together again.

We leave Sunderland in the morning and fly back to Ireland to stay with Mary's Mum, Bridie in Dungiven for a few days. I am VERY excited as I will finally get to see where our family has lived at Slaughtneil since the 1700's and meet some more of my Irish cousins.