May Day, definition: May 1 celebrated as a springtime festival

I am feeling kind of down these days. Everyone is writing on their blogs about the beautiful flowers they are enjoying, about the lovely weather they are hoping for, about SPRING. My days are getting progressively colder and the leaves are mostly finished changing colors and dropping. I was having a hard time getting out the house before it got cold: now I can see I’m just going to spend the next few months indoors. It takes twice as long to get Paul ready to go out because I have to bundle him up. I think we’ll stay indoors.

This morning, I realized it was May Day. I have always had a special place in my heart for May Day. One year, when I was a depressed, lonely, loner teenager, a friend of mine left me a bouquet of roses on May Day. “Happy May Day!” the note said. She left them anonymously, but I knew who it was. I haven’t talked to her for years, but I’ll always remember the service she did for me back on that spring day when I felt so awkward and alone. It was a reminder that in the “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer” (Camus); I just needed to stop thinking about myself and serve, as she did.

It’s just so sad that this year’s May Day is rainy, overcast, cold, and only getting colder. I must remember that summer will eventually come again.

I miss spring! (I guess it serves me right for bragging about good produce in November!)

Mayday, definition: an international radio-telephone signal word used as a distress call

I’m trying to find my ancestors. I researched James and Margaret and found their supposed marriage date in an index of marriages. The UK likes to horde the originals and won’t let anyone (even LDS volunteers) digitize or scan them for microfilm. So, for £13 I ordered the marriage certificate. (Yes, Mom, I know you claim Grandma already had one, but when I visited, we searched her apartment and couldn’t find it.)

For some reason, I thought that the marriage certificate would tell me everything. I guess I imagined a large packet or box delivered to my door with birth information and parental details, complete with an explanation of the mystery of where, when, and why Margaret disappeared fifteen years later.

Here’s what I got: a barely legible official copy of the certificate on file in a slim, small, half-sheet-of-paper-sized envelope.

The certificate tells me their names and professions, their ages, etc. Most of the information we already knew.

But here are my questions:

• If I didn’t know which James Simon/Simons/Simmons was my ancestor, how could I be sure this was their marriage certificate?
• How can I figure out where they were born? Tradition holds James Simmons as Irish, but we don’t know where he came from or when he came to England.
• How do I find where, when, and to whom James Delany/Simons was born? Because he was aged four at the 1871 census, he couldn’t possibly have been born to James and Margaret unless he was born out of wedlock.
• Could James Delany/Simmons have been born out of wedlock in the 1860s? Wouldn’t that have been pretty scandalous for this Catholic family? Can I assume he was born to people who were married?

I am completely lost as to where to begin. I’ll head to the Family History Library next Wednesday when it’s open, but my experience is the librarians there are as clueless as I am.

PLEASE HELP if you have any experience with family history!

Note: Any Benac family members who’d like to save £13 can view and download a high-res jpg of this image here for your own family history files.