The product of three canals

Hundreds of tonnes of clay and granite. That's what had to be shifted to create the Staffs & Worcs Canal, and then the Chesterfield Canal. Without these two canals I wouldn't be here.

My forebear, Hannah Gee, born at Chesterfield in 1792 is a product of these canals. She is also the product of a third canal, the not-yet-constructed Cromford Canal, where her parents arguably met. However no earth or sand needing shifting ahead of her birth. Her father didn't even lift a sod of earth before he had eyes smitten on the young millworker (Hannah's mother).

The Staffs & Worcs is staggeringly pretty. They say you are taken through gently rolling West Midlands countryside, never quite making it to an urban settlement. I walked along this canal by accident last February, little realising it was where my ancestors met.

Jonathan Gee, the canal builder, came across Sarah, a girl from Swindon, Staffs, in 1767. He was working on the Staffs & Worcs, which ran through Swindon. She fell for his charms immediately and they were married.

They are enticed into Derbyshire by the building of the Chesterfield Canal, that's canal number two.

Their son Nathaniel breaks away from his father's influence, and casts about for work on the third canal, the Cromford, with plans beginning in 1791. Nathaniel's interest is very much diverted by the presence at Cromford of a girl called Ann. She fell for his charms immediately and they were married.

Hannah, their child, is born at Chesterfield in 1792, the product of three canals.

Watching her bake bread and cakes in later years, living in a pit village - you never would guess at the millions of tonnes of earth moved ahead of her birth. Did she sing?

♫ I feel the earth move under my feet, the sky tumbling down... ♫

Most un-Royal

Why can't I seem to get back to any Royal forebears? Cornish cousins just a snitch away in Gwithian have ancestry through the Edwards family of Lelant and back to some lord in Devon, namely Mr William Crimes, and thence back to the famous Neville family, who made Kings and were grandsons of Kings.

I come close at times, brushing purple cloaks with the real deals, but then in my dreams the ancestor bows and scrapes away and is revealed simply to be a passing medieval tradesman. Again!

Hard-working Cornish folk in my tree washing filthy big yards of linen and left it stewing in massive dye pots, and produced politicians poets and physicists in two generations. Yet more are quoted in their earthy tones talking at us from centuries past [see Hunter].

Our ancestors the Holme family, Kings of Mardale, now under Haweswater, had massive beef with King John back in the 1200s, and as such none of their descendants would have dallied with the royals, living as they did in Norse obscurity in their hidden valley in the Lakes. So that profitable line of enquiry goes nowhere.

Our forebear Thomas Beresford, had 21 children and lies in a grand old tomb in Fenny Bentley, Derbyshire. He is accused of sending a private army of men to Agincourt, approximately 5 years before he was born - so again, perfidy disrupts a really nice story.

My grandmother's maternal line hails from Derbyshire, the scene of much of this frustrating screed. It seems that they might just merge with the Gell family of Hopton Hall, Derbyshire in the mid 1600s. Some enterprising fellow has scoured the Gell ancestral origins for anything remotely Royal, and found the following piece of mediaeval scrag end:

Hugh Lupus, 'Fat Hugh' 1047-1101, who probably wasn't a nephew of William the Conqueror, and who probably wasn't the father of Geva Lupus. Geva did marry in to the Basset family who eventually washed into the Beresfords, and thus Gells.

It is almost as if my determinedly independent ancestors sheered away from the royals at every and any opportunity.

Nobody ran away to become a mistress of the King or his functionary or anything similar. They just weren't having any of it.

Most un-Royal.

Road Outta Town... Take 2

Of course everything you read and feel has to be right. Doesn't it? My Carlines migrated to the city in 1865 marrying in one big town, then making Manchester and Salford their home for ever more. In 1865, like I said. Previously they were in a the little mining village of Eyam, where people tipped up their incomes from the scrubby land by digging out what they could in a primitive way.

Villager comes to city. What a story. Love it. Except it's not true... exactly.

Ellen Carline did arrive in Salford in 1865 with her husband in tow, and for sure she grew up in that lead-mining settlement in the northern Peaks. But this wasn't the end of the tale. It wasn't even the beginning.

Roll the clock back please. Five generations if that's ok? In this family, that equates to only 100 years.

Sarah Brasier was baptised in Kinver parish church, rural Staffordshire in September 1751. Before she was two the family were on the road. You can see the picture of the actual road, above. In September 1753 her sister was baptised in the new home, Swindon, half-way to Wolverhampton. It's a lot more built up, with 2.5 acres per person rather than 4 acres in Kinver (from information at GENUKI).

Trivia note: Sarah was even younger than 2, owing to traumatic calendar changes around her first birthday - causing 1752 to lose 11 days in the wrangle. Some bender.

Leaving Kinver was a seismic change and the kind of move that, they say, only happens once. "That's it. We're townies now". Except, of course, that her great-great-granddaughter ended up having to repeat the rite of passage a century later.

What happened between 1751 and 1865 then?

Well. Sarah married in big old Dudley's 'Top Church' age 16, 1767, and the family moved to an admittedly rural area working on canal infrastructure and later moving raw materials up the conduit to big old Sheffield. Her son Nathaniel opened a public house opposite the iron foundry in reasonably-sized Chesterfield and died young, 1805, owing to his wild ways - we suspect. That left granddaughter Hannah armed with no choices at all but plenty of latent business acumen. She married a lead-mining widower from a small peak village, 1807, aged 15, and catapulted herself back to rural obscurity. Great-granddaughter made no changes to the marker. Great-great-granddaughter eventually left the obscure village in 1865.

End of the line

The remnant
Down the end of the lane, where grass still grows in the middle of the road, lies my landlady's old home. It's still there, untouched, unvarnished. Like a book sitting on a library shelf, it contains all you might need on the long dead subject.

Hannah Dooley was agreed to be the last of the family residents in Eyam, passing away in 1946 (not bad for a grandfather born in 1771). I've got a letter from someone who remembered her little cottage, plus some postcards she wrote, and she also left a Will. The Will isn't very interesting, but we're happy enough overall.

Another last-of-the-line was the box-of. -frogs that was Miss Stuart Barone. Rich,storied, and in ill health, her light odometer reading  masked an exciting life in exile during the war. With her dying gasp you can hear the grief in her Sicilian village home. And to accompany this there'll be plenty of candles. She leaves a document, another Will, hopping around the decades. Announcing her birth in Alberta (1908); sorting out her grandparents for posterity, and scattering about the American connections like wild mountain herbs.

Treasure is a wonderful name for any family member, and this one was also, last-of-the-line. Someone told me he made a bonfire around the time he was in poor health, making his peace with the world, of all the family effects. Bonds of indemnity for obscure field purchases from the 1860s, solicitor's letters to his long-dead grandfather. It all needed to go up in smoke before he died, he felt.

Harrumph was my reaction, ambitious as I was to find a photograph of the parents and children, or even his grandmother, a key person in the tree.

Last week a gentleman wrote me from southern Somerset, exorcising his own ghosts. There were photos of cows from the 1960s, old cottages in hamlets the motorcar hadn't seen. And round the corner, in every frame, out of shot, was Treasure, carefully described. These memories have been pickled in amber for us.  And better by far, after a wait, than silly old parchment from the bonfire.

My mustachiod great- great- grandfather, William, has 85 descendants living, at a conservative estimate. Yet his two sisters Arundel and Catharine had children and grandchildren but no surviving descendants at all!

One spinster lady I met thought that her sister, who'd died age 16, would have been the one to get married. Catharine's grandson Phillip wanted to marry, but nobody wanted to go through with it. In a small town in Oregon, his father's shame  was too much to bear.

Three troubling events occurred in poor Percy's life (the only child of Catharine to have issue): losing his elder boy in the swollen waters of the Washington River in 1921; being found to defraud local people out of their money at his small town in Oregon. But the trigger for all the sorrow and insecurity was decades earlier in 1896, age 22, when this mild but bright fair skinned lad-on-the-make got too close to the flames. Witnessing a Chinese gangland murder in L.A., he went on the run. I honestly think if he'd kept his pretty nose out of Chinatown, Catharine (his mother) would have descendants, and Phillip, buried in a Veterans grave, would not be End of the Line.

Their lives in 65 characters

The sisters, by which I mean, mine and my mother's, asked for kind of a one-pager on the family history.

Key facts, quirky discoveries, who's who, exactly who the cheese maker lady was, which relative went to Bogota, the name of the place in Ohio where they all went.

They want me to empty my pockets in the school yard and show them all my best marbles.

Or, they want me to 'fence off' all the soft leaves of the forest floor and hurry them quick to the one or two precious orchids.

After nodding my head enthusiastically at this idea, because I do want to share, I realise that's not the way it should happen.

You all need to comb through the dull pages and discover gems for yourself. To read through the source materials and pick out passages that you personally like.

I don't mind making that process a bit easier by providing typescripts of cramped original text, providing a master chart showing how the mini-charts fit together, setting up a keyword index to aid navigation...

But the discovery, that's got to be a personal matter.

Let me know how you get on 😁

Letters from 1921 and from my DNA sequence

You can't hide your letters from me, bud.

A long time ago, back in 1921 as the world settled down to a brief peace, my grandmother was due, and, later, born. "I hoped she would be called 'Ellen' after me," wrote the baby's grandmother, a crotchety old woman born before the Crimean War.

Everybody in the letter is now gone of course, including my grandmother (aged 96) who limped on until 2018.

But in the letter from the time of her birth is mentioned an abstruse relative, cousin Margaret from Westcliffe(-on-sea). One of my first tasks as a child genealogist was to peer at old maps and yes to conclude this was probably the Westcliffe near Southend rather than the one in rural Lincolnshire.

Margaret appears once, at the dawn of my grandmother's long life and is never mentioned again. It eventually transpired she was Ellen's first cousin a poor orphan thing, a jewellery polisher from Soho no less.

(And yes that is the Soho in London not the one in the Mendips!)

The shutters have long since come down on Ellen's day. The letter briefly puts Margaret and her very London childhood on the same page as Ellen, who, I slightly exaggerate, grew up in a castle. The accidents of birth and the lives of two very different sisters in the previous generation.

Well now, it is indeed very much 2018 and why am I telling you allthis?

The letters in my DNA are recently sequenced and they shout very loudly that I'm related to folk in Rensselaer county, New York, a mostly German area in the eastern upstate bordering New Hampshire. It's the place where cousin Margaret's sister Mrs Starck arrived a lonely undocumented teenage bride from Soho with her older Prussian husband, in 1863.

Margaret would hardly remember her and you'd never tell from her will, penned from Hildaville avenue, Westcliffe, that she had any relatives at all. Only her devoted cousin Ellen.

What a shock that was to learn.

So, as the dust eats us all up, memories, dislocated teenage brides (delivered to a lunatic asylum before time progressed further), hand-penned letters about long-ago babies, a silent box holding 96 years disinterestedly... My deeply encoded genetic letters back it all up.

You can't hide your letters from your genetic buds.

I'm off to marvel at the Hanoverian prinzessen and their likeness to my somehow-cousins over in Rensselaer county.

And say a quiet prayer for Sarah (yes, that was her name).

A Blast of Fire and Ice

Five senses aren't enough... to describe everything. Heat rising from the roof of my skull, my temples pulsing. Some other force is at work: sometimes fire, sometimes ice.

Phillimore is an American-sounding company. They published vanity books, seeming replicas of parish registers in a typed format on heavily textured cream paper, artistically torn down the sides. To me age 12 their product looked the real deal. Forgetting the medium I went straight to the message:

Catherine Marshall, my forebear, had married James Lowry at Truro St Mary in 1809. And the witnesses were William Marshall and Nicholas Marshall. A powerful, strong, entry to come down through time.

The creamy paper, the incredibly high ceilings of the Westcountry Studies Library. The new names, the family unit. The sense this was deep Cornwall. The heat blew off the roof of my skull.

Since then, well, I've learnt it's bad to be obsessed with genealogy. We all descend from the same ancestors after all and maybe we're a chaotic mishmash with no real threads that can be followed backward meaningfully. Throw in a vast number of "non-paternity events", confused clerics muddling or omitting the names of females...

And, here's the killer fact. Apparently the DNA of some ancestors gets diluted away to nothing in the random cement mixer that is the cell meiosis. In effect over time their contribution was just an empty box.

Hmmmph. Let's raise an empty glass to ancestral anonymity!

This week has restored the story I always knew had to be true. That history, our private family history, is passed down through real named people, every step of the way. What your Grandpa said, true. What the registers said, true.

I match exactly the DNA of a descendant of Nicholas Marshall.

~~~~~

My other Cornish blow-your-head off moment was the day I sat with salt in my hair in the microfilm reading room in Truro. This time I was a few years earlier, in the 1780s on the coast near St Ives. By virtue of another forebear, I was a Trewhella. The temples pulsed. Dang I can still feel it.

This week, two decades on, I match the DNA of a Trewhella descendant.

These people are in my veins.

The character in Daphne Du Maurier's House on the Strand loses his grip on reality through connecting with the past. I'm happy just to have a blast of fire and ice.

The Teenagers

When I first heard that Henry VII's mother was only 14 at the time she have birth to him I was understandably appalled.

It is very rare in my family for couples to marry below the age of 21, and I can only think of one example where the bride was below 18. That was Mercy Haine an orphan who married at 16 in East Pennard, Somerset, sailed to Prince Edward Island and gave birth to her first child the following year, 1834 age 17. She was a remarkable lady having 12 children in all and becoming the first lady of the Island.

Consequently, I was highly sceptical of the published dates of Hannah Bagshaw (1792) and her eldest son John (1808). Was she only sixteen? I ignored the problem as she was a healthy 34 when my ancestor Milly came along in 1826.

We eventually found the marriage for Hannah to Mr Bagshaw and it was in 1807 so she was in fact only fifteen. I had never heard of such a marriage. It took place in Rotherham where the records were shockingly bad. Money must surely have changed hands with the clergy here.

Hannah's daughter Milly and Milly's daughter both had their first child age 19/20. So this makes already the generations of young relationships, 15, 20, 19.

Going back into Hannah's past was going into the unknown. Her father's mother was only sixteen when she got married back on Christmas Day 1767 in Dudley.  Dudley at Christmas would be bad enough perhaps... (I'm sure its lovely!)

Hannah's mother marries at the church of the unusual spire, Chesterfield, and the record is beautifully kept - unlike that of the next generation at Rotherham. We don't know her age for sure but with a husband of 23 she has to be fairly young. The handwriting says as much. We think she was 17, as a candidate of that age fits all the naming patterns and biographical setting.

So we have Ellen 19, mother Milly 20, mother Hannah 15, mother Ann 17?, mother in law Sarah 16 (and her mother 19). At least five generations of inexperienced women becoming wives and mothers, surely a recipe for disaster and social ills.

I am absolutely not condoning the circumstances under which these women might have lived, but they were not sixteen forever. They lived, mostly, to become wise elders offering counsel and guidance to the next generation.

This series of episodes remained hidden in our family tree until last year but covers I suppose the periods 1767-1808 plus 1846-65. I am aware that at least two of the girls were in service when they fell pregnant, while two may have been romances and the other a rational choice to escape a family situation.

Sarah has then the dubious honour of being my youngest six x great-grandmother. I recently walked in her footsteps of the family move in south Staffordshire from the 1750s.

There is more yet to find about these folk.

Research on age at marrying:
From Average Age at First Marriage for Women in Mid Nineteenth Century accessible by NFR Crafts, 1976, shows the estimated median age at first marriage for women in Staffordshire (1861) was 22.4, whilst for women in Derbyshire it was 23.2, a full year older. Those in the Westcountry and the Welsh borders added another year on top before marrying. Habakkuk (1971) found that urban classes married earlier than their rural counterparts, adding that urbanisation is therefore a major cause of population growth. Crafts argues against this believing that infant mortality (in the time in question) countered out the earlier marriage dates.

Even in 2014, women in Wolverhampton were still marrying at an age two years younger on average than those in Derbyshire. Fertility across the two areas is dauntingly higher in Wolverhampton, too, see here and here. The younger relationships which happened in Derbyshire can be explained by illegitimacy.

Further reading:
Population Growth and Economic Development since 1750 in History Review. Habakkuk, 1971
Age at Marriage in England from the late Seventeeth to the Nineteenth Century in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. R B Outhwaite, 1973.
Age Patterns of Marriage, Population Studies. A J Coale, 1971.

Daughters of Hannah

Many of you will know the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose body kept on giving before death (in the form of lots of babies), and after death (in the form of her cancer cells which have divided at an incredibly rapid rate). Keeping up with her descendants, or the location of all her cancer cells, would keep someone occupied for a long long time.

I gave given myself the task of finding the descendants of Hannah Shaw born 134 years earlier in Derbyshire 1776, around the time we lost the American Colonies. There are loads. At first I thought there would hardly be any, as only a rag-taggle bunch are still at home in 1841. Hannah really struggled to get going, finally getting a good rhythm with her cousin (and husband) in her late 30s. It was Ellen, born when she was 37, who really got the tree moving. I am losing track of all of her granddaughters, and great-granddaughters.

My plan is to find one descendant of Ellen (and Hannah) in the female line each week. So that by June 2018 I will have a suitable candidate from Hannah's line ready to do a DNA test. The candidate must be in the female line, in other words 'of the body' of Hannah.

We have my cousin Klaus waiting in the wings, descendant of Hannah's older sister Ann. Hannah and Ann lived very different lives but much seems to link them together. Until we do the DNA test we won't know for sure they were sisters. The test will very much cement together exactly what happened in those key years 1790-1 in the family tree.

Putting it crudely, who exactly screwed who.

I am flitting back to Bonsall Bank where much of the action took place with a view to establishing even more postcodes of living relatives, of the body of Hannah, who will be suitable for the DNA project. Watch this space.

Hidden Roots: Behind the Marriage

All I really wanted was to find out something, anything!, about the couple in this marriage entry - which is for 1791 in Chesterfield, north Midlands.

 

Most of the marriages that made me were mature couples solemnly throwing their lot in with another, having had something of a life already. I didn't think this one was.

What lay behind the marriage was my biggest discovery of 2017.

I knew the only child of the marriage very well: Hannah. She founded a dynasty of hardworking, short-lived women, all working-class business women who took their plenty of nothing, and made plenty of something.

But her parents were one big closed door. And when you burst open a door, you don't get to control what you see.

######

Nathaniel Gee and Ann married for love, of that I'm sure. Their first and only child was already on the way. When Ann died the very next year, Nathaniel's next daughter (by a new wife) was given her name. He only reached 37 himself. So by 1810 the couple were both dead and their love folded up and gone like dry leaves.

######

Finding the story

You didn't tune in to watch me clang open filing cabinets, and scroll through microfilm for the right baptism. But tippie-toing along the path, DID lead to the right baptism, for both Nathaniel, and Ann. Bear in mind please I knew NOTHING about them. Not even their real ages.

Reality struck. There was nothing I liked about possible baptisms for Nathaniel in London fringes, the east coast or urban Manchester. Bearing in mind he died 1805, I like the look of this family unit, based in Derbyshire, but with a Nathaniel in the mix. Something needed exploring here.

I really thought there was a vacant position here for Nat, maybe the son of Jonathan and Sarah? To my amazement, the door clicked open and there were plenty of riches to behold. Turns out I was right.

The groom

Nathaniel Gee was baptised 1767 in West Bromwich, just outside Birmingham, our second city, some years before his parents came to Derbyshire. Jonathan and Sarah Gee married the previous Christmas (1766) in Dudley, administratively in Worcestershire, clear the other side of Britain's second city.

Wheesh!! The pages kept turning and turning. I scribbled 5 pages of trees no problem. I checked out 2 wills and there are at least two more to check at some point. The family kept rabbits, wine and something to do with hot metal. They were interesting and an eight-year old girl got a pet sow as a gift to bring piglets in to the family equation. And that's just the mother Sarah.

The father Jonathan - well he turns out to have been a formidable builder of canals. You name a big stretch of man-made waterway from the 1700s and this man Jonathan Gee had his finger in whatever pie there happened to be going. Let's just say I have a barge trip around the UK booked as a some-day project, and that is going to be all about Jonathan with almost no down-time to see all he did.

Nathaniel has the blood of 3 counties whirling in his veins, and that's great, but what about Ann?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The bride

Ann the bride was probably 17 years of age and definitely not 'from Chesterfield' as the marriage entry implies. I know now that Nathaniel was a bold young buck of 22 and capable of relabelling 'black' as 'white' if he chose to do so. He had his father's big ideas and all his talking shook his later children right up the ladder. A hundred years later, one of his granddaughters would hold court in Nottingham, giving the only published account available of life in that city across the 1800s. Effortless and faultless, she was a rich woman at the castle alright, and stuff the poor woman at her gate.

Ann was from a poor family with an ambitious and clever mother who died. She was probably baptised at Wirksworth, Derbyshire, right in the heart of John Palmer's famous project, in 1776. (John is researching the family of the ambitious and clever woman, and appears in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack with his website apparently managing to host the words 'baptise' and 'slurry' on the same page.)

I would like to tell you that the ambitious and clever woman lived a long and happy life and that her influence lasted. Well no and yes, in that order. Every single woman in the family since Ann's mother downward (on our line) had the ability to read and write. There were a couple of wobbles along the way.

I would never have believed that Ann from Wirksworth could be the lady marrying at Chesterfield, if it wasn't for the go-getting Nathaniel. Look at his bold signature. Can you believe he wooed a girl 20 miles away (under 18) got her pregnant and convinced the vicar at Chesterfield that she was of a majority age and also living locally, for three consecutive weeks? Of course he could! The two towns are marked on the above map.

The landscape west of Wirksworth, where Ann's less-than-spectacular father scrabbled a living from the lead mines, is quietly stunning. Although she shot her bow before attaining 20, she left a sister. Aha! I didn't mention her. The sister has descendants in the female line, who if they can shake their cheeks loose of genetic material will have the same uterine line as my father and other relatives.

Do you remember Hannah, only child of these remarkable parents? She's a remarkable lady also, in her own right. And do you think you might tell the name of her ambitious and clever grandmother, who whiled her short life away up in the hills of Wirksworth. That's right she was Hannah too.

My Hannah is locked securely into her own landscape, her patient and determined ambition a family inheritance. She did not die her mother's death at 20, she did not reach for the stars and get smashed on the rocks like her father. She was not extraordinary like her grandfather the canal-builder. She has a whole other family just like her somewhere about. We will find if the DNA matches, but even if not, the synthesised back-story of her parents remains my fondest discovery of 2017.

Read more in Love on the Canal the story of Nathaniel and Ann's romance.

Story penned for Elizabeth O'Neal's December blog party Holiday Twofer.

Love on the Cromford Canal ❤

Did my 5xgreat-grandmother, Ann, meet her husband on the canal? Believe it or not, probably only a DNA test can reveal the answer.

Ann Shaw was born in the 1770s In Derbyshire, and until recently I was having a hard time picking out which one of the many local girls of this name was my forebear.

Then I pushed and pulled all the records, shoving filing cabinets and index cards out of the way. If Ann was literate, which she was, then her sisters should be too. Looking again at the box of her signature, there's a lot of space around her name. I'd say she was young, like maybe only 18.

Ok, that's good, and that brings me to an Ann baptised 1774 in Wirksworth parish church, who actually lived her childhood both sides of the valley west of the church called Via Gelli. A stunning ravine, wooded, just right for the scene our DNA test hopes to peek in on.

We jot down the few facts we have about Ann scratched up from the register: She was young, 18, on her marriage, she could write her name and maybe more, and she landed up on the north side of the Via Gellia right by a certain canal at Cromford...

Whoa. That is of interest. The Ann we're looking for married Nathaniel Gee a young buck of 22 who:

...owned a boat on a canal in the 1790s (a few years later)!

Have we got a case of Love on the Canal?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Options ahead 
To test our hypothesis we have two apparent options:

1) Wait for the Minute Books of Cromford Canal 1789-96 to hit inter-library loan.
They might show Nat Gee bidding to construct a portion of the canal east of Cromford. I suspect and hope they do, but in the absence of documentation of the Love from the 1700s, we have Option Two.

2) Get folk tested.
Ann was 18 it seems, pregnant with her only child, and died of likely complications from the birth barely a year into our story. Yet my late father, and others come down from the child through the daughter's line. Including my cousin Nick.

If, if if, Ann was the girl from Middleton-by-Wirksworth who by happenstance acquired the ability to write, then we need to look at her elder sister Hannah, who also showed she signed her name (rather than making a mark). This ability did not extend, interestingly, to their much younger half-sister, suggesting the older girls' mother (a Doxey) was the guiding force in the family, even as it hovered perilously on the bread-line.

Hannah has family too: the fabled other side of the looking-glass. They started out with few means, living off the lead lying locally, and not drifting far along the social scale, many remaining in a setting overlooking that Via Gellia for as long as time allowed.

If Nick (from Ann) and a.n.other (from Hannah) could reach across the centuries and compare their diverging DNA.....

Nick would have a perfect copy of Ann's mitochondrial DNA, while a.n.other bears a rock-solid version of Hannah's. Could they be identical?

Identical DNA would tell us that Ann did indeed fall fatefully for her boat-owning lover and make 20 an impossible age that she would never reach, from their Love on the Cromford Canal ❤

The Three Counties Challenge

Come on then folks! Which of your forebears do you reckon qualifies for the Three Counties Challenge? Entrance qualifications are simple: they need to have exactly three counties of origin! Here are my four contenders who had a massive impact on my tree.

(1) My first forebear was my grandmother Mary, born 1921 in Cheshire. She has ancestry in Somerset, Cornwall and Norfolk, which impressed me very much at the time.

Q. What brings these genes together?
A. Methodist ministers marrying girls from 'out-of-county' two generations in a row.

(2) Then we go back nearly a century to Dad's great-grandma Annie Gibson, born 1836 in Allendale, near the geographical centre of mainland Britain, but far north of anything I'd heard of before. She brought three new counties to the yard: Cumberland, Northumberland and some part of lowland Scotland, most likely Dumfriesshire. I can't help thinking of John Peel with his coat so gay, out hunting in the Cumberland countryside when I think of this line.

Q. What brings these genes together?
A. The uber-meddling Christopher Bird, vicar of Chollerton, who pulled my relatives across the Pennines. Then a certain knee injury on the railway in 1844, which proved fatal, and which spat poor Annie back the other side of the Pennines again.

(3) We reverse another 25 years to the birth of Blanche Morton, my Grandpa's great-grandmother, born about 1811 in Newport, south Wales. She brings Monmouthshire, Glamorganshire and, much earlier, Carmarthenshire to the table. This is an impressive haul, and without her, I'd really have no proper Welsh ancestry at all, so big thanks go to Blanche on this one. As a bonus we have her photo too.

Q. What brings these genes together?
A. Water and boats. The boatbuilder moved along the coast and up the rivers, marrying and moving as he went.

(4) It's now time to put the time-machine back in fast rewind, to get back another whole 43 years before this. That's right folks, we need to whoosh past Trafalgar, the French revolution and even American independence, back to 1768. I'm sorry it's a little cold out here, with the mini ice-age just having left and we're only halfway through the hundred years of Georges.

It's time to introduce Nathaniel Gee, born in West Bromwich in 1768. His birthplace is not somewhere I expected to find on my tree - ever. My family have managed to avoid the Midlands, carefully skirting around it, but Nathaniel is born slap-bang in the middle, just as the industrial revolution is hitting. Exciting times, no doubt. Nathaniel provides yet another three new counties: Cheshire, Staffordshire and the much earlier Shropshire.

Q. What brings these genes together?
A. The magnetic pull of Wolverhampton and its satellites, sweeping ironworkers into town. And more importantly, water and boats. The boatbuilder moved around the canal network, marrying and moving.

The final list of counties hauled in by these individuals is impressive: Somerset, Cornwall, Norfolk, Cumberland, Northumberland, Dumfriesshire (probably), Monmouthshire, Glamorganshire, Carmarthenshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire. And the causes were Methodism,  a meddling vicar, a trapped knee, and plenty of boats on the water.

Can any of your ancestors pass the three counties challenge? I'd be interested to hear about them.

A Canal's Gonna Come

Sooner or later a blog is gonna come. A big old splash concerning the most recent news from the 1700s. Just like my Taylors who kept me going for blog after blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 , 8, 9, 10, 11, 12). I know the titles of the pages will be: A Christmas in Dudley, Gee Whizz, A Walk along the Canal. But I'm not ready to post: not yet.

Two Sides of Town

Picture the scene, a pretty town where a river runs through it.  Much bevisited by Americans keen to note down their heritage whilst swans and fresh cygnets queue up to enter.  A park, a castle, a group of youth; a theatre, some pubs, an ugly dual carriageway.  A reality star popping in to try some baby yoga.

In one corner of the town, up on the hill, is an ugly pub.  Squat, flat, squeezed into the estate, with cheap doubles whenever you want and locals escaping the grime for an hour or two's oblivion.  Karaoke blasts out across the estate as the bladdered locals slash up against the wall.  Gerald Phipps (not his real name) scratches a tattoo as he greets the new arrivals from behind the bar.

Let's go back down to the centre of town, and steeply ascend a hill facing the other way.  Broad open fields greet us and a happy cow winks approvingly at the cut of our jib.  Surprisingly quickly open country hits, and then a very posh school - fields and yawning tennis courts roll out in front of us.  Cynthia Claydon (almost her real name) rolls down her starched white tennis pleats and adjusts her ponytail as her friend Charlie's Merc peels off into the distance.  She finished her sixth-form here a few years ago, and is back, purely for artistic licence, and doesn't have anything to actually do, except look great.

As you've guessed, Gerald and Cynthia are cousins.  Well not exactly, Gerald just got one of Cynthia's 4th cousins pregnant, and is the babyfather.  The point is Cynthia descends from Miss Sophy Smith of South Lopham, Norfolk; whilst Gerald's pregnant ex-missus descends from Arthur Smith of South Lopham, Norfolk. They are both siblings of Miss Ellen Smith of South Lopham, Norfolk, who is my Granny's fearsome granny, Granny Smith.

Sophy quickly married in the upward direction, selecting a young accountant who rapidly turned his family into drapers, and the daughter was soon engaged to an auctioneer, and the next generation were farmers in Sussex and before you know it, it's time for a posh school for the daughter.

Arthur decides to head down the social ladder,  starting having a lot of children before he is really ready, and the wedding bells ring midway through a pregnancy, and then he turns 21 as the next one arrives and then it's time to quit his job and act as a blackleg and remarry (not in that order) before finally at 50 he wraps it up and heads to Australia.  Leaving 3 generations in straightened circumstances.  His grandson kicks cans around the place in WW2 digging up scrap age 12 to help the family get by.  To be fair, the family did good, but they did end up on the other side of town in this case.  No question.

I'll stay in the middle.  I'm not climbing a hill to sing karaoke, and I have no idea what a tennis pleat is, or if it even exists.

Thank you Ellen for weaving a happy medium between Arthur's chaos and Sophy's money.  I'll take your side of town on this occasion.

1940s Google Map

Introducing a Google Map to show where people lived at the time of their death in the 1930s and 40s - based on the probate index of England/Wales from this time period.  It does include addresses worldwide and is well worth a browse.

http://www.haine.org.uk/toms_wills/1940s_Google_Map.php

Questions, comments, via the homepage...

Love is...

Love is... A Powerful Text Editor! When you have, as I do, 508 million wonderfully tender pieces of data, the laptop is going to cough and splutter a bit.

After a frustrating 24hrs where I couldn't get the data sorted at all, came salvation.

EditPadPro. This handy gadget was hastily downloaded at Swindon station before the WiFi conked out. It can insert carriage returns wherever you'd like in a long line of data. I wished this to occur every 30,000 characters in order to be re-imported into Excel cells, which have a maximum capacity.

Until I demo'd EditPad I'd not considered that my problem was essentially one of word wrapping. Word wrapping is fiendishly complex, similar to those bucket measuring or optimal grain storage problems from Egypt and Greece. Once you have too much text for a line, we automatically go on to the next line, making decisions about where the words should break. I needed the same approach for my string of values.

The data all lined itself up to be processed like innocent lambs through a sheep wash. It all trotted through and is back sitting pretty in my spreadsheet.

Very hairy moment successfully navigated. Will I finally get the wretched project up and running this weekend? We'll see.

Filthy Lucre

Strolling around Clerkenwell last week, I tsskd at the lack of bike lanes. Somewhere I still have the letter from Aviva Buses sharing their heartache at the way their driver knocked me off my bike there back in 2002. They also shared the driver's private address which was such a thoughtful touch.

Just cross the road and you can reprint yourself at the 3D printing shop (featured), so perhaps I was being fussy making a complaint.

When we hunt for Filthy Lucre, we are conducting a Lucre Search, and my cousin of this name lived at the gorgeous Redman Buildings on Clerkenwell Road. Well he was called Lucas Urch but he's known, by me at least, as Filthy Lucre.

It's entirely appropriate, that over a Dirty Burger and pint this evening, that I should have resolved my Lucre Search.

Eagle-eyed readers will recall that Miss Sophia Urch is to be found lingering around the premises of Mr J Lucas in the 1841 census for Cossington, Somerset.

I have today determined that coincidences like this don't really happen. I'm double the age I was when Lucre first emerged, alongside Sophia, and there's not a cat's chance that one of them 'just happens' to be living with a Lucas, when this was their mother's maiden name.

So, welcome to our fold, Miss Sarah Urch, star-crossed lover of Galway Town's most vociferous Catholic policeman. And your grandson who edited the Telegraph. And your niece Wilhelmina Margarina and nephew what had the big house outside of Dublin.

And of course 'filthy Lucre' himself, Lucas Urch of Clerkenwell.