Whenever banks decide they won’t lend to you for no apparent reason (such as when you earn £22,000 a year and low outgoings, but can’t get a measly £5,000 loan to buy a car to get to work), they’ll tell you that it’s because they are ‘responsible lenders’ who will never lend you more than you can afford.

Then they pull shit like this

Rest assured that aside from some mild stomach upset, I am very much well. However, it seems that while I may currently be the only Jay Schlackman in the world, there was another:

Curiously, I started going by Jay about a year or so after that.

Anyway, the reason we found this is that when seeing my Dad today, I borrowed from him a selection of papers from his collection of family records, specifically the earliest records regarding my great-grandfather, Jacob Schlackman. When we got home, Elizabeth’s librarian/archivist nature kicked in and she quickly located a number of good leads for more information about him. The revelation that another Jay Schlackman died in the US in 1998 is unrelated to our family (as far as we know), but the juiciest of the relevant finds is a record of a court document in the National Archives in which he is named as a “co-respondent” in the divorce papers for Lily Duparc (nee Griggs), the woman he later married (i.e., my great-grandmother). The court document is dated 1919, just one year before their son (my grandfather) was born!

We are now planning to make a trip to the Archives to take a look at this, and other records, including the 1901 Census record for Lily when she was 5 years old. Elizabeth also found burial records for two people who appear to match what little information we have on his parents (Aaron and Lia Schlackman), who were buried in Edmonton Federation Cemetery, North London, in 1925. This is interesting because we did not even know before if they had immigrated to England or whether they had remained in Paris, where we know he had siblings.

As you can no doubt tell, it’s been a thrilling evening of research in the Schlackman household.

For some reason, many of the mandatory ‘No Smoking’ signs at the Beacon School are upside down.

One would think that in a time of unprecedented levels of flooding in the UK, it might be pertinent to add some information on this