Bibliography - Mark D. Bishop
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My Stray Sussex Angel, by Mark D. Bishop, published June 2013 in Sussex Family Historian (vol. 20 no. 6, article, pp.267-271) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/508977] & CD SFH40 from S.F.H.G.

Among the various bits and bobs that inhabited my childhood was a collection of travel books contemporary to the 1870s and 1880s. However, they were not about your ordinary European touristy places, no these volumes were about far-away locations that were still largely unknown and uncharted by English explorers. Places like the Tablelands of Venezuela and the hinterlands of Africa that only Livingstone and such explorers had charted. My maternal great-grandfather, John Alfred FORTUNE, had been the original boyhood owner of those books and it is only now that I realise what they meant to him as a young and lonely lad, they had been a panacea for his broken heart. Yet, there is something else that belonged to him, which I have cherished even more over the years and have managed to hold on to by a thread. It is an almost complete, full-colour set of cards giving a pictorial History of the 'Sports and Pastimes of many Nations' that were obviously given as freebees when purchasing miraculous Holloway's Pills. Indeed, the card for Patagonia makes that part of the world look very alluring and reports, 'Often young children are found at play with flamingos by the brookside'; whilst Brazil is, 'the most important country of South America.'

Thy Will Be Done, by Mark D. Bishop, published March 2014 in Sussex Family Historian (vol. 21 no. 1, article, pp.27-32) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/508980]

Berkeley House, at No. 2 Albion Street is a delightful B&B and I fully recommend it. Just stroll down Lewes High Street towards the river and it is easy enough to find; there on the left, you cannot miss it. No. 2 is first in the row of fine Georgian terraced townhouses that were constructed in 1822. That 1960s, out-of-place looking block of an 'extension' built on the side is not what it seems though, because No. 2 Albion Street was the Sussex Probate Office from 1857 until 1976. That 'extension' was actually the walk-in strong room, the safe depository for keeping the Wills and other important documents in secure storage; the original 'The Keep', one might say. It was actually erected in two stages, the lower in 1862, while the upper was plonked on top of it in 1880. The heavy 8ft high, steel entrance door from the landing is still in situ, its brass fittings in working order, with the flat top of the strong-room now providing a pleasant roof terrace.
All these factoids are important to me because my great-great-grandfather (on my father's side) was the Chief Probate Clerk at No.2, Albion Street from about 1861 until 1882 - that being the year someone took a pot-shot at Queen Victoria at Windsor Station and fortunately missed. Hey, please do not let your imagination get away with you, it was not my great-great-grandfather, for no fame holds he to such high notoriety. No, he is known simply as Edwin BATTERSBY the Probate Clerk. Having said that, he might have been known to my great-great-grandmother (on my mother's side), Mary Jane "the Redhead", alias My Stray Sussex Angel (Family Historian Vol. 20 No 6 - June 2013) who also, coincidentally, by karmic design, or otherwise, happened to be living around Lewes High Street in the early 1860s.

Kate, Sid & Our Ruby, by Mark D. Bishop, published December 2014 in Sussex Family Historian (vol. 21 no. 4, article, pp.193-197) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/508854]

All I knew about my great-grandmother, Kate, before beginning my ancestral research, was that she, in my mother's words, 'Great Gramma', gave me a pair of booties as a christening present - now, that was a long time ago. Although I have no memory of it, the gift was dutifully noted in the 'Baby's Progress Book' that my mother so lovingly compiled over the first year of my life. Oddly enough, I still have those booties. Being too small now, I have kept them all the same, subconsciously I suppose, because of what they represent; Kate's outward delights and hidden grief that she passed on to me through this gift, perhaps somehow knowing that I would one day find out what really happened to Sid and also share in her sorrow at losing her precious jewel.

Sussex Connections & Karmic Questions, by Mark D. Bishop, published June 2015 in Sussex Family Historian (vol. 21 no. 6, article, pp.276-281) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 15860] & The Keep [LIB/508876]

While the investigative writer seeks rational answers, the poet within me must, of necessity, pose irrational questions: Perhaps it is fate, or is it karma that creates the destiny of ancestry to group itself connectively into certain geographical locations, or is it coincidence based on an egocentric viewpoint? For example, both of my maternal great-grandmothers were born, bred, raised & wed in diverse locations, but were to pass away within a year of each other near the Sussex coast, after having spent the final years of their long, lucrative lives there. Great-grandmother MORGAN [nee ANDREW] (1878-1969) was born in Cornwall and married a butcher in Suffolk where they raised their large family, while great-grandmother FORTUNE [nee MEERS] (1868-1968), of Anglo-Italian extract, made claim to being a Cockney, spent a year or so in Gibraltar after her marriage and ended up raising her brood on an ait at Shepperton, as wife of the Thames Conservancy Engineer.