St Mary's Church in Lowestoft

With our records in hand, we headed to the Church of St Margaret. We had some idea of the gravestone locations, so we wandered about Section VIIIb and found the tomb of Will and William Neslen, but couldn't find Richard and Margaret (Samuel Neslen's parents). We moved our search to section VII and immediately found the tombstones of the Liffens, Margaret's parents.

With a funeral going on in the church hall, we borrowed a bucket and scrubber and set to cleaning off the graves as best we could How strange to see the graves of Samuel's grandparents. His grandmother lived into her 80's and saw the entire family leave for the States. We knocked on the vicar's house and his son let us into the church. This was the church where Samuel and Eunice Neslen were married and where most of their children were baptized.

We took once last walk through the cemetery and stumbled on the grave of Richard and Margaret Neslen and of Samuel's brother, Richard, who drowned in the Oulton Broad at the age of 21. What luck!

Just down the street from the parish church was a huge LDS ward house. We tried to get in touch with the local Family History Library, to no avail and the ward house was entirely surrounded by a huge cast iron and locked at the gates with very solid locks.

We walked from the hotel to the waterfront of Oulton Broad which was packed with families picnicking, playing on the swing sets, eating ice cream. We stopped at the Lowestoft Museum, a local collection dating from the Bronze age to today, with a bit of everything in their old cases. They featured a large collection of Lowestoft Porcelain (the "famous"? Lowestoft Porcelain). The old factory was on Bell Lane where the Neslen's lived. The volunteers at the Museum were interested in our family quest and although there are no Neslen's left in town, there are a few Liffen's. They gave us the name of Stanley Liffen, an 80 year old gentlemen who is the Wesleyan Methodist minister.

We spotted an Indian restaurant for dinner- the Balti. Expensive, mediocre food and filled with boat folk.