gma - it's an addiction, I find. Wow, thinking of going to New York..
The glassworks was fascinating.It enlarged my ideas of what the job was like enormously. I had no idea also that there were so many glass works there, used to be 23 cones in the area.
Inside was almost scary, a 100foot high, 40foot wide chimney and you're inside it. Black with soot. Working in there was described as being in a cross between an oven and a cave - hot, dirty, sooty - and draughty too.
I was looking for it as we approached, but it is such a landmark that I shrieked when I first saw it as we drove towards it!
...Alarmed my sister...
Afterwards we went to the Glass Museum up the road. Masses of all kinds of glass objects. Glass is beautiful stuff.
Oh yes, at the cone we met the resident glass artist, and she mentioned her mum doing family history, and then Sunderland - so I asked her if the name Bell had come up in her research, and it had. We exchanged emails and I'm now hoping that something about my gggrandfather's third wife might come out of this - we have no idea how they met. He married again in 1883 and she was 19 - he was 71....and there were two more children!