Thank you for visiting my website.

Mi Casa (my house, or home) is a sort of autobiographical miscellany, or fragments of my life. It is not my life story, just bits and pieces about what I've done and would still like to do, where I have been and still want to go to, things that interest me, and so on.

The name Mi Casa reflects my new-found love of Spain, which is not to say that I have given up on my love of France, nor of lots of other places. Some of these pages will be about travel and music, perhaps some philosophy and politics, others will be about my home town and my family, in fact there is a lot of family history on the Our Family Genealogy Pages (click on logo above). There is also stuff about other people and places, and anything else that interests me.

I have many and varied interests, in life, the universe and everything, far too many for a simple life. Therein lies the problem - there is so little time and so much to do, not least of which is to see the world, and change it.

One of my pastimes is creating web sites about my interests, for example, Single Boots, the walking group that I am a member of, and my Vousden One-Name Study, a worldwide study of people with the Vousden surname, my grandma's maiden name. Another is Cradley Links dedicated to the local and family history of my home town of Cradley in the Black Country in the Midlands of England. Last but not least, there is also the forerunner of Cradley Links, which we shall call "old" Cradley Links, on which I collaborated and now maintain as it was on the day it "died". So there is life after death!

The picture on the right (top) is a painting by California-based Doane Hoag, artist and architectural illustrator (reproduced with permission). It is a remarkable likeness of the image in my head of "mi casa", the Spanish house that we may find and live in one day. The image below it is me, about half a century ago, and the jigsaw is a map of my family history, where the eight outer pieces are my eight great grandparents, with me in the middle. At the head of the page each one of the eight maritime images represents a chapter in my family's history.

 ENLARGING A PICTURE

        Hover the mouse pointer over any picture and if a magnifying glass appears, a single left click will bring forward an enlargement, usually with a caption below; another click will close it.