Strange Mail

[catseye]

I have quite an unusual surname, So when a friend found some postcards addressed to someone with my surname in a second hand shop, they bought them and gave them to me.

The postcards were addressed to someone with my surname in Ilfracombe, North Devon. Not incredibly co incidental, since my paternal grandfather had about fourteen brothers and sisters and was from South Devon, so it's not inconceivable that a distant relative may have moved to Ilfracombe. What is odd, is that the handwriting on the cards looks very very much like my mother's...

I showed the cards to my brother, who knows more of family affairs than me, and apparently we know nobody in Ilfracombe, and my mother knew nothing about the postcards (she died shortly afterwards, so we couldn't quiz her on the subject).

I should turn them out again. I've recently moved house so I've put them somewhere...

 

[bugmum]

My colleague is from Barnstaple. When I was trawling through Devon baptismal records, I found quite a lot of references to her surname - which is not one I'd heard before elsewhere - from the north of the county, and I mentioned it to her. She said that everybody she's ever met up that way with her surname has turned out to be a relation, no matter how distant.