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[edit] Alderney Notes
I've just (20 June 2009) started this place to hold my notes and pointers to resources about the history of Alderney.
I visit Alderney about once a year at the moment, and I've become interested in the history of the place. Not just the big history of the fortifications and occupation, but the small history of changes in commercial usage, and tracking down places from the more recent stories that I heard from locals.
I'll give you a concrete example. When I visited in October 2007, for my first visit in over a decade, I arrived on the day that the Chez Andre opened again, for the first time in seven or eight years. In talking to people, the "Man in Black" was mentioned again and again, with stories about buying property all over the island, including the Chez, and then him dying. But no one could even tell me his name! It wasn't difficult to track down the story of Christopher Dawes, but that in turn led me to more questions about places and property on the island.
I took a set of photographs of every property on Victoria street at the time but there have been plenty of changes between then and May 2009, when we last visited for a long weekend. One of the things I like to do is to keep a better photographic record of changes to the island over time, inspired in part by what John Elsbury's Alderney Postcards site shows.
