With a little free time on my hands I decided to play around with a virtual scrapbooking program, Smilebox…since there’s no way I’ll ever have enough free time for me to make a real scrapbook.

Rather than just post a bunch of pictures as I have with other galleries, I thought I’d put virtual scrapbook pages here in addition to other photographs pertaining to Nick’s life. A quick biography can be found here, to supplement what you’ll find on this gallery page.

Without further ado, Nick’s gallery!

ABOVE: Nick’s grandparents’ home in Farncombe, Surrey, England. As the caption reads, “Mum & Pop’s happy home in Farncombe. Nick’s Home Sweet Home until he was twenty. His sanctuary as he struggled to come to terms with his talents.”

ABOVE: Nick as an infant and Nick in the mid 90s. Unfortunately I don’t have any baby pictures of Nick other than this one. When his parents fairly well abandoned him to his grandparents, his baby and early childhood photos didn’t make the trip with him from Southampton to Farncombe. His grandparents fell out with his parents over the way Nick had been treated as a child, and recovery of whatever photos there may be just never happened.

I managed to find an address for Nick’s parents in 2002 and wrote them with minimal details of Nick’s disappearance, since they were predisposed to hate his psychic gifts anyway. I never heard back from them, but they must have read the letter because I did hear from a few other family members of Nick’s…and that all led to the answer I gave in the Ever Wedding interview about giving some of his family closure with a headstone/burial plot, even if I believe he’s still alive. So, given they wouldn’t even contact me in the midst of my grief, I hardly think they’d respond to a request for baby photos.

ABOVE: “Two Spiritualist churches where Mum & Pop took Nick to nurture and develop his psychic talents, and to see he’s not alone in this world.” You’ll see on the About Nick bio page that Spiritism is one of the ways his grandparents exposed him to other psychics and expanded his mind. These are interior shots of two churches they took him to; I’m not sure how many there were that he visited in total, but I think it was only a few.

The black and white photograph is of a very young Nick looking rather moody. For a long time it was the standard “head shot” he sent to media when querying a story idea, until I convinced him that perhaps periodically updating his photograph might be a good plan!

ABOVE: The famous Mum & Pop, his grandparents, whom I so dearly wish I could have known. I love them like they were my own simply for how well they raised my beautiful Nick, even if they were gone by the time he was 20. Why is it that time spent with the truly good people on this earth is always far too short?

The righthand caption reads “Sister Emma, sadly passed away. Below, Hardaway ancestors: great grandfather as a young man with his sisters, and as a baby.” I love this photograph of Emma, I can really see a family resemblance to Nick. Unfortunately they hardly saw each other - she remained with his parents when he went to live with his grandparents. She was four years older than him. She married in 1983 and died in childbirth in 1984. The baby also died. It was a sorrowful common bond for Nick and I to share - we both lost our sisters at a young age. For me, I knew Katie for 6 years before she died. For Nick, he knew Emma for 10 tumultuous years before he went to live with his grandparents, then contact pretty much ceased…so she might as well have been dead to him. It’s really sad that she actually did pass away so young (25). He never had the chance to reconnect. Any opportunities he did have he didn’t seize, and though he rarely speaks of it I know he feels guilty.

The Hardaway side of Nick’s family is the only side I know much about. His maternal side, surname Jones, didn’t interest him in the slightest. His maternal grandparents retired to France, so he only saw them once or twice in his entire life. I think on some level the Jones side of his family has become synonymous with his parents’ intolerance for his psychic abilities - as if somehow it’s the Hardaway genes exemplified in Maureen and James that were most understanding, most enlightened, most noble. (I know, those genes are in his father too and his father disliked him as much as his mother…I didn’t say it was a logical association!) So Nick did have in his possession some photographs of his Hardaway ancestors, which were passed down to him by his grandparents. I know I have a photo here somewhere of Maureen’s mother, the one who had psychic abilities too. I’ll see what I can find.

Stay tuned for more photos!

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1. [...] Nick’s Scrapbook [...]

   Pingback by Unraveling Rose Red » New Galleries: Our Scrapbooks — March 17, 2009 @ 4:56 am

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