The issue raised was of clothing. Somehow drifted in that direction from a reference to poetry(Burns). In absence of any dialogue on Vikning/Orkney poetry, we ended up discussing yesteryear stuff, and the clothing question was asked again. I guess when one visualizes gypsies, one thinks perhaps of their colourful attire, and perhaps their music. Boing! There's how you get to clothes again. Another example of spontaneous dialogue born out of a thought/ desire to know a little more about our ancestor's past. The way that young men hopped aboard ships to come here from Orkney with the HBC makes you wonder if there wasn't a little Gypsy in them all. In our family, apparently one young chap in town with his brother, asked the younger fellow to go home and tell his mother that he had gone to america for five years. That's about how a gypsy would organize a trip. But one might have a better visual on what the gypsy wore. The HBC had lots of records of clothing, detailed accounts of actual items purchased on credit by their employees over here. But in earlier years, it seems to be an issue that folks don't much think about. Hope this helps......Stephen On Monday, May 24, 2004, at 04:23 AM, Gelborn@aol.com wrote: > What has this to do with the "tinkers of gypsies?" > I missed the details, so would be glad to know what the question > really was! > Thank you, > Geoffrey Elborn > > > ==== ORCADIA Mailing List ==== > To unsubscribe from the Orcadia mailing list, send an e-mail with the > word > 'unsubscribe' in the message body to orcadia-l-request@rootsweb.com >