Where and when are you right now?

[Ylfa]

Anyone up for a little general family history chat? I’ve been stuck for a while in 1864 in a notorious Virginia prison with a great great great uncle and fancy a change of scenery.

Oh that's sad about being confined for wetting the bed.

Was this the same person as "the most aggravating man in Eastbourne"?

No, the little boy was on my maternal grandad's side, the most aggravating man in Eastbourne was on maternal grandma's!

I am now in the audience at the Royal Institution in 1802, with a flock of other fashionable ladies, watching Humphrey Davy demonstrate the first incandescent electric light, and bragging to my friends about my new home Electrical Machine ("with Apparatus and Mahogany Box").

Natural philosophy is the In Thing, don't you know?

What a lovely thread. I haven't done all that much of my own research for a few years, and it's about time I started again.

Well! Life is fast among the movers and shakers of the turn of the 18th century.

I've spent most of the last month in a mansion on the outskirts of St Petersburg, waiting for the ice to melt and the shipping to restart. Hopefully this year it won't thaw suddenly in the night as it has a nasty habit of doing – dumping travellers who were crossing the Sound of Finland and overnighting in temporary wooden inns on the ice, into the Sound, cattle and all.

Anyway, then I'll head south to Naples for the winter of 1817-1818, to catch the eruption of Vesuvius and meet up with a surprising number of my friends. The standard biographies don't seem to have noticed we were all here at the same time.

Might write a book on volcanoes or geology. My friends and family are into that – but you wouldn't know we were related if you weren't paying attention, 'cos even the blokes in my circle change their surnames more often than they change their underpants. Makes us unexpectedly slippery to follow, for all we're such public figures.

Sound Gulf of Finland