»  The Virtual Attic — Documents — JD's 1989 British Passport

 

This passport was issued on June 5th, 1989 by the British Consulate-General in New York. Almost three years married, I was living with Rosie in midtown Manhattan. I was still working at software development for First Boston on a guest-worker visa. I'd been hoping to get permanent residence in the U.S.A. — the "green card" (which was actually pink) — but there had been some foul-up in my application and no progress was being made.

Meanwhile my mother, who had suffered a stroke in 1987, was finding it difficult to live independently at her house in Northampton. At some point in late 1989 or early 1990 she declared her intention to move out to a residential-care home. She did so in July 1990.

Frustrated with the visa business, worried about my mother, and needing to dispose of the house, I quit my job and moved with Rosie back to England in 1990. We lived in my mother's house for a few weeks, then put it on the market and bought a small town house in London's new Isle of Dogs development. I took a contract with First Boston's London office.

A year later, my mother settled in the residential-care home, my old boss at First Boston in New York said my job there was still open if I wanted it, and starting the visa business from scratch we could avoid the previous foul-up. We put the town house in the hands of a rental agent and went back to New York.

We camped out in a rented apartment in Queens for a few months; then in March 1992 we moved to a house in Huntington, Long Island. Our daughter was born there the following January; our son came in July 1995. Mt mother passed away December 4th, 1998, aged 86.

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The passport has some pages of front matter showing date of issue, my picture, and so on: here, here, and here. The other pages show my 1991 U.S. visa and a scattering of entry stamps for the U.S.A.

I have listed these stamps below in chronological order. That's not necessarily the order they appear in if you just flip through the passport's pages. A later stamp may be on an earlier page. The location of a stamp is entirely at the whim of the stamping official. Clicking on the date at left will bring up the page with the stamp.