Book excerpt: The main focus of this book is to answer the questions that my close relatives would have wished they had asked me before I started “pushing up daisies” . When I was at school the subject that I detested was history. Now, many decades later writing the family’s history from a different perspective. Throughout my book I highlight stories about the world that was, yet some of the outcomes have resulted in many benefits for today’s society. When I reflect on the past, many of these events would have been regarded as irrelevant and little attention would have been paid to them. No doubt the dates of the births and deaths of Kings and Queens are important but so are many things one can learn from the quirky events and changes that happened as society progressed. Some of these were good and some were not. That is for you, the reader, to judge and hopefully, learn from them. Throughout my book in which the stories are told, they are presented with a sense of humor and interjections.