[WillowTheWhisp]

Originally Posted by egg&chips

I read this article about Butch Cassidy whilst looking for an old story from the evening telegraph. I'm not sure that I really believe the connection to Charles Dickens
http://www.prospector-utah.com/butch.htm

The connection to Charles Dickens is perfectly accurate. I once did the tree myself. Charles Dicken's father was a cousin of the Parkers. It used to be a bit of an 'in joke' amongst us Accy mormons that we had such illustrious connections in our history. There was a branch of the LDS church here in Accrington at that time, although never a purpose built chapel - then either during or sometime after WWII (I'm not too sure of the date off hand) the Accy saints became part of the Rawtenstall Ward and subsequently a chapel was built on Haslingden Road. Then during the 80s we were detached from Rawtenstall and attached to Blackburn - for a few years we became a separate Accrington Ward and now we're back with Blackburn again.

One of the 'Dickens' tales which usually gets brought up amongst us locals is that when he went to Utah he observed the emmigrants at the docks and remarked upon how punctual, orderly and organised the Mormons were - that's usually followed by one of us looking at ourselves today and saying "What went wrong?" We have this joke about "Mormon time" meaning that we never seem to be able to keep to a schedule. If a party is announced as starting at 7:30pm someone always asks "Is that 7:30pm GMT or 7:30pm Mormon time?" (knowing it will probably get going about 8 o'clock) The only things that do run to time are the Sunday meetings and even then we can never seem to start choir practice straight afterwards - there's always some sort of delay!

How's that for a thread wander?