Family History

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I'm not sure whether there's ever been a thread on this.

My father collected old family photos and made a family tree of his ancestors. He kept a file with old documents including newspaper cuttings and letters. I inherited these after he died in 2003, and saw the potential for writing a book on the subject. My mother's nephew had done research on her side of the family, and by 2006, I had produced a full-length book, documenting different strands of the family from around 1515 onwards.

What prompted me to start this thread was the "shouting" on another thread (the use of capital letters to make a point). I have a loud voice, as did my father, and we may have inherited this from my great-great-great grandfather, James Bagot of Salford.

[marthe]

EA, what an interesting family history, especially about the Chelsea Bun Man! I love family stories but can't say I have anything quite as interesting to share.

[amateur51]

EA, what an interesting family history, especially about the Chelsea Bun Man! I love family stories but can't say I have anything quite as interesting to share.

Oh don't you worry, Bbm will be along in a mo'

[Flosshilde]

EA, what an interesting family history, especially about the Chelsea Bun Man! I love family stories but can't say I have anything quite as interesting to share.

Even the most apparently uneventful family history can have some interesting characters & events lurking - my partner has researched his mother's back to the eighteenth century & discovered in the process some unknown half-siblings (she was adopted, & the family they knew about was her adopted one), and a temperance campaigner who was jailed for drunkenness at one time.
The important thing is to do it when your parents are still alive - my father died a couple of years ago, and my mother has just died, & there are questions about their childhood and parents we'll probably never know the answers to.

[BBMmk2]

Well besides the well documented side of my more famous side of my family, one line, my wife managed to trace back to 819AD, about 35 37 generations worth, including the odd knight of the realm and peer as well, and mayor in Faversham around 1666. Plus certain ancestors who refused to sign that document relation to recognise the establishment of the Church of England, ofcourse as a result of not signing, they received the death penalty!! Quite a rebellious lot!

[Richard Tarleton]

Even the most apparently uneventful family history can have some interesting characters & events lurking - my partner has researched his mother's back to the eighteenth century & discovered in the process some unknown half-siblings (she was adopted, & the family they knew about was her adopted one), and a temperance campaigner who was jailed for drunkenness at one time.
The important thing is to do it when your parents are still alive - my father died a couple of years ago, and my mother has just died, & there are questions about their childhood and parents we'll probably never know the answers to.

All true - but parents and family can also prove highly unreliable witnesses. I've written a carefully researched family history with the help of a genealogist friend which has corrected some long-standing family mythology. You need to be prepared for the odd skeleton to tumble out. My mother (still living) has always misrepresented her family's social and economic backgrounds on both sides to something more in line with what she thought it should have been (there is no danger of her looking at this forum). Looking at the occupations of grand, great grand and great great grandparents on census returns has adjusted the focus considerably.

It would have horrified my very upright grandmother (on the other side) to know she and her elder brother were born out of wedlock. But such was the case - and she was also unaware that her father, an American artist, had been briefly married before to a much older lady artist, eloped to Italy and divorced - all by the age of 21. He then met my great grandmother (another artist ) with whom he travelled to England from Boston - on the passport of him and his first wife (first names were similar) thus enabling the pair to pass as man and wife. They were only married, in St Pancras, three years later and before the birth of their third child, my great aunt. Family members can either not know this sort of stuff or actively suppress it!

An horrific story concerning the fate of two brothers sent home from Kenya because their father (one of my great grandmother's siblings) could no longer look after them was significantly altered by the next generation, presumably to make it sound less bad for those responsible, but unravelling it has proved most welcome and cathartic for the descendants of those involved.

And my 9xgreat grandfather - I've mentioned him before - emigrated to Plymouth, Massachusetts from Dorset in 1635, and amongst other scrapes was had up in front of the settlers' court for lending a gun to an Indian

[Boilk]

A lot of poeple take pride in their ancestry - which to me seems misguided as they cannot take any credit for what their ancestors achieved. Better to take pride in what your direct offspring (or pupils/mentees) accomplish as a result of their interactions (direct or indirect) with you.

On my mother's side of the family ancestry has been traced back to Roman generals, but then we've likely all got ancestors in high places - aren't most Europeans said to be direct descendents of the Emperor Charlemagne?

[marthe]

Well said Boilk. I'm laughing about the many descendents of Charlemagne as this is a great family joke. One of my Belgian great uncles was an historian who took great pride in tracing the family tree back to the great emperor. Along the way, one of the descendents of CM was Baudouin II, son of Baudouin I (known as Baudouin Bras de Fer or Baldwin Iron Arm) because of fighting against Viking raiders. Baudouin II married Elstrid, or Eltrude, a younger daughter of Alfred the Great. Great Uncle C., the historian, always told us not to take any of this too seriously because "every king has a shepherd amongst his ancestors and every shepherd a king amongst his." My father did the math and figured that Charlemagne's descendents were as numerous as the sands on the beach. He encouraged us to look to the present and the future rather than get overly excited about the past.

[vinteuil]

.
"When Adam dalf, and Eve span, / Who was thanne a gentilman?"

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

All true - but parents and family can also prove highly unreliable witnesses.

Indeed. It is important to cross-reference to get a better idea of the truth. Idle rumours can solidify into "fact" ever so easily.

[BBMmk2]

I can't see what is wrong with being proud of the past family members. They are the ones that led you to be born. I am proud of what my family is today.

[marthe]

Well said, BBM. Every family has a unique history. I marvel at the complexity of any family's history, the strands woven together from disparate sources that make each family unique. Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, uses the theme of complex family history set against historical and cultural events in her novels about Chinese and Chinese-American life.

[ardcarp]

There was a story going the rounds in our family that my great great grandmother on the maternal side was from the Lords St Levan of Cornwall. My sister recently delved into this and found she was the daughter of an Irish knife-grinder from Aston (the slum end of Birmingham). Sic transit....

Anyway, I'm extremely sceptical about this 'tracing one's family back' lark. It depends where you trace it. For instance, each person has 4 biological grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great great...and so on. In only a few generations one can run into thousands, so it's easy to pick and choose a path to greatness or renown.

My favourite story (and this one is documented) is of my uncle (a much older brother of my father, whom I never knew). He was an early aviator and made money by doing aerial stunts off Bournemouth to entertain the crowds. He crashed into the sea and was nursed back to health by a nurse whom he married. They emigrated to Australia and he pioneered crop-spraying from the air, and then......he became that country's first official air crash investigator.

[Flosshilde]

All true - but parents and family can also prove highly unreliable witnesses.

But they do provide a starting point, even if the stories are disproved. And only they can identify people in photographs.

[Ferretfancy]

But they do provide a starting point, even if the stories are disproved. And only they can identify people in photographs.

I come from older parents, so I've always felt that I skipped a generation. I'm now 78, but my maternal grandfather died aged 40 in 1900, and my father served as a 17 year old in the Boer War!

Regarding identifying people in photos, I do have a photo of my grandfather taken in 1870, when he was ten years old, at what was called an industrial school. It's a group photograph of the school band, and I did know that he continued playing in a dock worker's band in adult life. Which musician in the picture is my grandfather?

Well we knew from a surviving band card that he played an E flat euphonium, so when I was at the Proms last year, I took the photo to the RCM for identification.

There were a couple of boys in the picture, rather dwarfed by their instruments, but going by their apparent ages we were soon able to guess which one was ours.

No other photos exist, so it was an odd experience to see somebody from my family after 143 years have passed