{"id":165,"date":"2009-05-29T07:11:51","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T07:11:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/?p=165"},"modified":"2026-03-26T16:30:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T20:30:19","slug":"by-royal-appointment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/2009\/05\/29\/by-royal-appointment\/","title":{"rendered":"By royal appointment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like many people, I have become very interested in my family background and have begun to do some genealogy. I have some excellent software to help me build a &#8220;family archive&#8221; and I am starting out by just talking to all my older relatives and recording everything that I can extract from their memories. I have barely started, but it is already fascinating and I was amazed at what I could uncover.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The oldest relative, whom I have ever met, was my great grandmother Jessie &#8211; my father&#8217;s father&#8217;s mother. She lived into her 90s and died when I was a child, so I can clearly remember meeting her. I entered what I know about her onto my family tree, which included her profession, which was a dressmaker. This sounded quite mundane as, 100 years ago, women commonly made their own clothes. But a discussion with one of my aunts yielded a great surprise.<\/p>\n<p>Jessie was not just an amateur dressmaker, she was one of the court dressmakers to Queen Victoria! My aunt showed me a patchwork that had been made of snippets of material used in making dresses for the Queen.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-167\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/files\/2009\/05\/patchwork-474x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Patchwork from Queen Victoria's dresses\" width=\"474\" height=\"1024\" \/><br \/>\nThis direct connection with history is what my project was all about, but I was amazed to &#8220;strike gold&#8221; so quickly. I can now get very boring when I insist that people talk with their older relatives and find out what great stories they might have to tell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like many people, I have become very interested in my family background and have begun to do some genealogy. I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[302],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-off-topic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9757,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/9757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}