Hello, everyone, I have been lurking for a while - since this is a genealogy list I wasn't sure if I would have anything to contribute, but Neal and Ann's posts about travellers' education seems to be something I can offer some insight on - I was born a traveller in Ireland and later moved to the UK with my parents when I was 7. My parents did a sharpshooting variety act called Little Beaver and Maree, and before WWII my father was a family member of the Kavanagh-McCourt touring theatre company in Ireland. I grew up `on the road' and was unable to attend school regularly in the 50s. To avoid having to attend schools a week or two at a time, my parents enrolled me in a correspondence school and I did my lessons in theatre dressing rooms most of the time. Can't say I got a great education ( I still don't know what algebra is) but I learned to read and write very well, because my father's theory was, I could teach myself anything I wanted to know if I could read. My website is at http://www.geocities.com/rollerbalancer My background, as you see, is more variety (Vaudeville) and circus than acting, although my parents still toured with a portable theatre when I was a little girl in Ireland. The show was half variety, half melodrama (Murder in the Red Barn, Little Grey Home in the West) and the family my parents partnered with were called Hope. I made my stage debut at about three or four in one of their plays. Gail Kavanagh --------------------------------- Yahoo! Search - Looking for more? Try the new Yahoo! Search