Family History

[LeMartinPecheur]

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...

That's not quite how it used to work down here in Cornwall, and no doubt in other remote rural areas with difficult communications

Sadly, this is one explanation for the vast size of the Bodmin Mental Hospital, a Victorian edifice I think and in full use not many decades ago

[gurnemanz]

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!

Something similar happened in my wife's family. She is German and only 61, yet her grandfather died almost 100 years ago in the first weeks of WW1. (He was a Lieutenant-Colonel and there is a classic photo of him in a pointed Prussian helmet). We have touching letters from him to my father-in-law who was only eight when his father was killed.

[Don Petter]

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!

I can just beat that! I'm 71 and my paternal grandfather was born in 1858 and died when he was 83, a year before I was born.

Here is a picture of him with his younger wife, born 1866:

http://tinyurl.com/nm5vvhy

[ardcarp]

That's not quite how it used to work down here in Cornwall, and no doubt in other remote rural areas with difficult communications

Sadly, this is one explanation for the vast size of the Bodmin Mental Hospital, a Victorian edifice I think and in full use not many decades ago

[Richard Tarleton]

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.

And it depends where it leads. American antecedants (father's mother's father) - back 11 generations, no problem, multiple family shoots. Wales - the quest for my mother's mother's father's family ran into the sand there because everyone in NW Wales seemed to share the same few surnames and given names. My colourful Scottish family difficult to trace beyond 1780s because of the particular difficulties around Scottish genealogy - you need to know which parish someone was born in, especially if you're dealing with Highland clans. So yes I've spent most time on the most interesting bits

Floss dead right about photos

[amateur51]

Floss dead right about photos

I had an elderly aunt who was the key to many names but she had Alzheimer's and was living in a home. I paid her a visit expecting there not to be much conversation but I showed her the family photo album and it all came pouring back - she got very excited and for around half-an-hour she was very much 'in the here & now' which was lovely to see

[Hornspieler]

The recent pictures on TV of the Royal couple paying their respects at the Anzac Memorial before departing Australia for home, prompted me to remember my father's account of the Gallipoli campaign (he was there and critically injured) and his experiences throughout World War One in which he fought at Paschendale, The Somme, Mesopotamia and Ypres.

This is a photograph of the Anzac Memorial in Freemantle which I took during our world tour in 2008


In 1964, at age 75, my father wrote an amazing account of his memories called "Grandpa's War Diaries" which make fascinating reading.

The only facts that he didn't mention in this account which he sent to my nephew was how he came to be awarded the Croix de Guerre" (Belgium's highest military honour) by King Albert and how he survived Gallipoli with a bullet from a Turkish sniper which travelled all the way from his shoulder down his spine.
I am now engaged in the long task of assembling his writings into a document file, which I would be happy to make available to anyone who might be interested.

Fred died in 1982 at the good old age of 93. As the destroyer captain who pulled him from the sea before the Dardanelles campaigne had even started told him: "Some of you b*****s can walk on the sea when your luck's in".


HS

[marthe]

I had an elderly aunt who was the key to many names but she had Alzheimer's and was living in a home. I paid her a visit expecting there not to be much conversation but I showed her the family photo album and it all came pouring back - she got very excited and for around half-an-hour she was very much 'in the here & now' which was lovely to see

Lovely story, ams. At the moment, my mother is the keeper of her family history and we try to jog her memory by looking at photographs together. In addition to the family album, Google has come up with nices images of the Bronx neighborhood where my mother spent her early childhood. This has prompted my mother to tell us stories about her side of the family, something she never did when we were growing up. My father's family was so well documented that Mom got sick of hearing about them! Her response was to trace her own family back to its European roots in Holland, Ireland, and Switzerland. We can't get enough her stories.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I had an elderly aunt who was the key to many names but she had Alzheimer's and was living in a home. I paid her a visit expecting there not to be much conversation but I showed her the family photo album and it all came pouring back - she got very excited and for around half-an-hour she was very much 'in the here & now' which was lovely to see

My mother was able to help me with my family history, but when she went into a care home with dementia, reading the book to which she had contributed gave her much pleasure and we would look at it together every week.

[amateur51]

Lovely story, ams. At the moment, my mother is the keeper of her family history and we try to jog her memory by looking at photographs together. In addition to the family album, Google has come up with nices images of the Bronx neighborhood where my mother spent her early childhood. This has prompted my mother to tell us stories about her side of the family, something she never did when we were growing up. My father's family was so well documented that Mom got sick of hearing about them! Her response was to trace her own family back to its European roots in Holland, Ireland, and Switzerland. We can't get enough her stories.

It's amazing the power of photographs to evoke deep-seated memories, music sinilarly I think - they take us back to 'the moment'. My home town in North Wales, is very fortunate in having an enthusiastic team of local historians who have researched & published several paperback books and one big hardback of photographs of years gone by. The same aunt was persuaded out of the fog of her Alzheimer's with photographs of the town where once she had been a successful business-woman - squeals of recognition & delight.

[Petrushka]

After my father died last November, we found dozens of photographs, mostly with no writing on the back. There is, however, one mystery that will never be solved. We have the death certificate of my paternal grandfather (born in 1863!) with his death being recorded as March 4 1931 but there is a photograph of him with the date on the back of April 1931! The handwriting is clearly contemporary with the photo so we are stumped.

Alas, a fair proportion of the photos my father left are complete mysteries but in other cases I just wish we'd all been listening more carefully when he talked about them.

My mother is in a care home with advanced dementia and there is now no-one alive who can help answer all our questions.

[clive heath]

In delving into family history and among the many photographs from my Great-Aunt Amy's memorabilia was one of the Rev. John Bascombe Lock who married Emily Baily nèe Heath her mother being Mary Ann Heath my great grandfather Alfred's sister. The Rev. wrote maths textbooks still revered (ha!) today in some quarters (as you will see if you google him) , he was a teacher at Eton and went on to be math fellow at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge.

His son, Robert Heath Lock wrote the book which I bought recently about which the following tome has been written more recently

"Robert Heath Lock and his textbook of genetics, 1906.

Author A.W. Edwards

Robert Heath Lock (1879-1915), a Cambridge botanist associated with William Bateson and R. C. Punnett, published his book Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution in 1906. This was a remarkable textbook of genetics for one appearing so early in the Mendelian era. It covered not only Mendelism but evolution, natural selection, biometry, mutation, and cytology. It ran to five editions but was, despite its success, largely forgotten following Lock's early death in 1915. Nevertheless it was the book that inspired H. J. Muller to do genetics and was remembered by A. H. Sturtevant as the source of the earliest suggestion that linkage might be related to the exchange of parts between homologous chromosomes. Here we also put forward evidence that it had a major influence on the statistician and geneticist R. A. Fisher at the time he was a mathematics student at Cambridge."

Thus reading this book is a matter of family honour! Robert married Bella Woolf an authoress in her own right whose books I have yet to track down. Her brother, Leonard, married someone called Virginia.

A Martin Packer from Cambridge was very excited that R.H.Lock was to be added to the DNB and pointed out that you can use the facility "Find a Grave" which I had never heard of but here it is:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=99238224

[Gordon]

One of the lessons to be learned from the above stories is that if you wish to get the best information about your ancestors ask your parents and grandparents etc early!! I know to my cost and also to friends engaged in FH that leaving it too late means some have died and others have lost the ability to remember well enough. I have an aged [90] aunt who is the last of her generation and so the only living memory available. Unfortunately although she is far from being demented she still gives different stories at different times but talks of related people that I simply find no record of whatsoever!! My suspcion is that these people are actually family friends and are not blood relatives at all. I should have asked my own parents and family long before but one gets to FH late in life.

Somtmes they don't get it anyway. An example was when I took ages to track come cousins in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire [we are from N Wales] and my father said he vaguely remembered them [mother's side but she died in 1986] and said he didn't know anything about them. When he died I found an address book in his bureau that had the cousin's address in it!!! If only....

[Anna]

What Gordon says is so true - also take a note of any family folklore as it usually has a grain of truth in it, although often attributed to the wrong family member. My grandmother used to tell me her grandfather's first wife died young through falling from a carriage and hitting her head on the cobbles whilst returning from a trip to the theatre. It transpires that his first wife did die aged 34 (but from pulmonary congestion) and it was his second wife's mother in law who died falling from a carriage!! We have the death cert where this is clearly stated as shock from the fall causing death. (Certificates are quite essential, I've found several previously unknown cousins whilst doing research and we've spread the cost by swapping certs)

Grandmother and her siblings also came into a French inheritance via said grandfather's youngest child from his first marriage and although I had a copy of all the research (done by Fraser & Co., the heir hunters) I stuck it in a drawer for years - when I finally got round to doing more delving I'd left it too late to question that generation.

[Richard Tarleton]

One of the lessons to be learned from the above stories is that if you wish to get the best information about your ancestors ask your parents and grandparents etc early!!

Family members can also be highly unreliable witnesses, either because they don't know or wish to conceal things. If I'd relied on my grandmother for information about her father's amazing life I would not have known anything about his first marriage and elopement from the USA to Italy, nor that she and her elder brother were born out of wedlock - because she didn't know. Her younger sister knew part of the story but by no means all, through things my great grandfather said to her in old age, but her older sister (the straight-laced rebel in a Bohemian family ) refused to believe it. Only careful research into passenger lists, marriage records and examination of handwritten passports enabled us to piece the full story together.

A shameful episode in another branch of the family three generations ago was modified to make people look less bad and attributed to the wrong family member - again, only careful research unpicked the true story.