A genealogist always has something new to discover. In an effort to break down the brick wall blocking access to my mother's paternal-line ancestry, which ends in London's Spitalfields district in 1818, I have redoubled my efforts. These have been greatly helped by the recent (15 September 2009) addition on www.ancestry.com of many hundreds of thousands of baptism, banns and marriage, and burial records for the London area, not just the City of London itself, and surrounding parishes in Middlesex, but for places south of the Thames in Southwark and Lambeth, and other Surrey parishes.
Why the push now? My mum, Marion, is 84, and a veteran of WWII, in which she served King and Country in the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service as a signalwoman and secret-cypher clerk in Prince Rupert, B.C., and Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is in good health now, but since her parents died at 54 (Herbert Chatteron ROBERTS, 1883-1937) and 78 (Beatrice Florence Elizabeth LARGE), she doesn't always think I can dawdle over the task of tracing her father's lineage before she leaves us...which Heaven delay.
To complete this task, I have been reviewing all my earlier work hoping to turn up that key lead I may have missed that will help me get past the 1818 barrier. In tracing the origins of the London ROBERTS line, I started naturally enough with my grandfather, Herbert. He started his career in London with the London and County Bank, main office, Threadneedle street, in about 1903, and came to Canada in April 1905 to join the Bank of British North America (merged with the Bank of Montreal in 1918), I have been going over the ROBERTS family tree with a fine tooth comb. H.C. ROBERTS was the son of James ROBERTS (1854-1890), who worked as a clerk, later cashier, with the same bank's Hackney branch. His death notice in the London Times shows that he served as a private in the Honourable Artillery Company, arguably the oldest military organisation in the World. His father, James ROBERTS, Sr (1829-1896), lived at 195, Shoreditch High street, right opposite the London terminus of the Great Eastern Railway, where he was a newsagent, tobacconist, printer, publisher, stationer, and representative for the Times (hence the appearance of family hatches, matches, and dispatches in that paper from the 1860s onward, for which I thank my lucky stars!). He, like his son, was also a member of the Honourable Artillery Company, though how the ROBERTS connexion with that estimable military outfit began, I still don't know. James ROBERTS, Sr's father Thomas ROBERTS (ca 1786/7-1838) was a carpenter, later builder, living latterly in Fort street, Old Artillery Ground, an extra-parochial place and one of the Tower Hamlets. He is supposed to have arrived in London from Cornwall to seek his fortune after the bottom fell out of the family business, tinmining, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815). Whether he had any connexion with HAC other than living in a house built over their old parade ground, I do not know, but it makes for interesting speculation given the involvement with them his son and grandson had...
My grandfather H.C. Roberts, however, was not a military man so far as I know. After being educated at Gainsborough Grammar School in his mother's home county of Lincolnshire, he lived for a time in Ireland, where, as he said with a twinkle in his eye after winning the boxing title for his weight in Ontario between 1905 and 1910, he had learned to box in his boyhood. You see, in Ulster (now Northern Ireland), where his mother lived with her third (and last) husband, Samuel FERGUSON, my grandfather, Bertie, was Protestant boy among the majority Irish Catholics so he had to learn to defend himself! But as an English lad in Ireland, being a Protestant didn't offer him much protection, for he had to take on all the rest of the Irish as well! I guess more than just boxing rubbed off from his stay in Ireland...blarney, and, of course, a love for the horses, but that is another tale!
My grandfather volunteered for military service in WWI but was refused due apparently to his having flat feet. I guess I can credit my existence in part to that! His younger brother Owen Howard ROBERTS (1888-1935), who had joined my grandfather in Canada about 1906, was accepted to serve in WWI, and went overseas with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. There he was badly gassed and shell-shocked, and came back to Canada a changed man. My mother thinks it may have been Great Uncle Owen whom the young Edward VIII as Prince of Wales told my grandmother, his sister-in-law, and a registered nurse, to take good care of when he visited Great War veterans on his tour of Canada in 1919. Owen later recovered enough to marry and start a family. He received Veterans' Land around Pleasantdale, Saskatchewan, but that was taken away from his widow and children at the height of the Dirty '30s when, still suffering from shellshock after so many years, he went into the barn one day and shot himself. Suicide was then a crime felo de se against the State, and so, hard as it seems from our vantage point today, the land he had been granted by the Crown for his war service reverted to the Government of Canada. My grandfather tried to help his sister-in-law and her children, but two years later he succumbed to a heart attack and died aged only 54. My Great Aunt Elizabeth Beatrice "Bea" (née EASTWOOD) ROBERTS eventually raised her three children with her relatives at Lac Vert, Saskatchewan.
Another of my grandfather's relatives who served in the First War was his first cousin, 2nd Lieutenant Charles Henry Hill ROBERTS (1888-1916), of Lambeth (part of London, but south of the river Thames, so in Surrey). He was a member of the education department in the London County Council, and was the only son of my grandfather's paternal uncle, Charles Thomas ROBERTS (1856-1892), a publisher, who had died, like his elder brother, James, my great-grandfather, while still in his 30s. His son Charles H.H. ROBERTS grew up with his mother, sister Ruby, and schoolmaster stepfather, Jonathan CHARLESWORTH. He probably followed his stepfather's footsteps into the teaching profession. His mother, Sarah, née BRAGG, had been born in New Zealand to Henry BRAGG, a London builder, who eventually returned to England with his family, and built many houses in his native Lambeth, including the one in which Charles had grown up at 110, Stockwell road, Brixton, London, S.W.9. One of his sons, Charles's uncle, served as mayor of Lambeth in the early part of the 20th century. His teacher nephew, Charles Henry Hill ROBERTS, joined the 21st (County of London) Battalion (First Surrey Rifles) as a corporal. He was promoted from corporal even before he entered the war theatre in France on 15 March 1915. According to the Times, Friday, 26 Feb. 1915, Cpl. C.H.H. Roberts [was] to be Sec. Lt. (Feb. 26.). [that is, second lieutenant]. Part of this must have been due to the loss of so many of the regiment's officers in the carnage of the battlefields of France, though it was likely also down to the fact that he was an educated man. Charles himself was killed in action in France on 15 Sept. 1916 having been awarded the Military Cross (M.C.) for his bravery. He is buried in Warlencourt British Military cemetery in the Pas de Calais region of Normandy. Because he was a bachelor at his death, his branch of the ROBERTS family has died out, except for the descendants of his younger sister, Ruby Mary ROBERTS, who married (1) William James OSMOND and (2) Leonard BOLTON, and died in 1929, leaving children by both husbands. Charles's medal card shows that his grieving mother, Sarah CHARLESWORTH, still at the Stockwell road address where her son Charles had grown up applied for his service medals on 27 October 1920. I am now making efforts to obtain a photograph of Charles, and hope some day to visit his grave in France to lay a wreath and pay my respects.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Alma Victoria Rattenbury: Setting the Record Straight
On Guy Fawkes Night this year, I watched the 1987 film version of Sir Terence Rattigan's last play, Cause Célèbre (1977), about the famous Rattenbury murder trial of 1935. Dame Helen Mirren played the murder victim's wife, Alma Victoria Rattenbury, and David Suchet of Poirot fame, played her learned counsel, T.J. O'Connor, K.C., M.P.
Alma was a Canadian who had married the famous English-born, British Columbia architect, Francis Mawson Rattenbury (1867-1935) in Canada before they moved to Bournemouth on England's Dorset coast with two young sons, Christopher (born to the second of Alma's three husbands) and John (the child of her present union). Alma, who had been a musical prodigy in her youth in British Columbia, was of a passionate nature, and as her much older husband Rattenbury (Ratz to Alma and their circle) grew morose and incapable, she took a much younger man, a teenager, aged barely 18, as her lover. One thing led to another, and the verdict in the joint trial of Alma and her young lover, let her off, but found him guilty, and bound for the high jump.
Consulting the historical accounts available, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which includes a biography of Alma, I was struck by just how vague and imprecise every one of them seemed to be about Alma's background: where and when she was born, who her parents and family were, and when and where her three marriages (and one divorce) had occurred. Even her name was a source of confusion as I examined the books by F. Tennyson Jesse (The Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner, 1935), Terry Reksten (Rattenbury, 1978, rev. edn, 1998), A.A. Barrett and R.W. Liscombe (Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture and Challenge in the Imperial Age, UBC press, 1983), and Sir David Napley (Murder at the Villa Madeira, 1988). So, as someone well-versed in British Columbia genealogy, history, and the how-to's of research, I set about to clearing up the unnecessary mystery about Alma's background, perpetuated as recently as this decade by Elizabeth Murray, a former assistant to Sir David Napley, in her entry on Alma for the new ODNB (2002) put out by my alma mater's famous publishing wing, Oxford University Press.
So watch this space as I progress with my work on uncovering Alma Rattenbury's true origins.
Alma was a Canadian who had married the famous English-born, British Columbia architect, Francis Mawson Rattenbury (1867-1935) in Canada before they moved to Bournemouth on England's Dorset coast with two young sons, Christopher (born to the second of Alma's three husbands) and John (the child of her present union). Alma, who had been a musical prodigy in her youth in British Columbia, was of a passionate nature, and as her much older husband Rattenbury (Ratz to Alma and their circle) grew morose and incapable, she took a much younger man, a teenager, aged barely 18, as her lover. One thing led to another, and the verdict in the joint trial of Alma and her young lover, let her off, but found him guilty, and bound for the high jump.
Consulting the historical accounts available, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which includes a biography of Alma, I was struck by just how vague and imprecise every one of them seemed to be about Alma's background: where and when she was born, who her parents and family were, and when and where her three marriages (and one divorce) had occurred. Even her name was a source of confusion as I examined the books by F. Tennyson Jesse (The Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner, 1935), Terry Reksten (Rattenbury, 1978, rev. edn, 1998), A.A. Barrett and R.W. Liscombe (Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture and Challenge in the Imperial Age, UBC press, 1983), and Sir David Napley (Murder at the Villa Madeira, 1988). So, as someone well-versed in British Columbia genealogy, history, and the how-to's of research, I set about to clearing up the unnecessary mystery about Alma's background, perpetuated as recently as this decade by Elizabeth Murray, a former assistant to Sir David Napley, in her entry on Alma for the new ODNB (2002) put out by my alma mater's famous publishing wing, Oxford University Press.
So watch this space as I progress with my work on uncovering Alma Rattenbury's true origins.
Friday, November 23, 2007
A Day in the Life of a Genealogist
Today was full of the mixed bag of things that can come up in the life of an old hand at genealogy.
It began with my answering email.
A few days before, I had renewed use of my membership at genesreunited.co.uk. I sent out about 40 emails to people researching the surname ERNLE (also EARNLEY, EARNLY, and other variants) on which I am engaged in a One-Name Study. Now I was reaping the responses, and replying to them. It turned out that most people knew less than I did about the family. I have ended up as a bit of a world expert on this rare, possibly extinct (in the male line), English surname.
In fact, I have even written an article on it for Wikipedia under my nom-de-plume, Vancouveriensis, which is Latin for "of Vancouver".
I am trying to correct the pedigree of the family that has been published in "Burke's Landed Gentry", and by various genealogists over the years. It seems that noone has got the lineage right. One historian even had a man born in the 1540s as the paternal grandfather of another man born in the same decade!
I have been gathering wills and Chancery records as well as the more usual parish register entries to try to sort out the family's history.
My current theory is that all the families with names pronounced the same way, despite the wide range of spelling variants, are all descended from the same stock, which can be traced in documents, though not yet in a joined up pedigree, back to one Luke of EARNLEY a.k.a. Lucas de ERNLE who was granted land in the manor of Earnley, a parish on the Sussex coast of England, by his de Lancing relatives in 1166.
Of course, I didn't answer all forty or so messages all at once. Some of them involve quite a lot of work on my part to inform correspondents of what I know. It turns out that I generally know how I am related to them even if they don't know the connexion because they haven't looked into the family very extensively. It's a lot of work to survey a family tree over some 800+ years.;)
For a bit of exercise and to fight the middle-aged spread, I went for a walk along Vancouver's beautiful seawall for about an hour. One has to catch the clear weather while it's around at this time of year.
I returned to the computer for a while and then broke to watch the latest instalment of "Who do you think you are?", the new genealogy programme adapted from the British hit series, shown on CBC channel 3. This episode featured Newfoundland actress and comedienne, Mary WALSH, tracing her Irish roots from the Rock back to County Wexford in the late 18th century. I was in the Emerald Isle this spring for 12 days, so it was good to see the lush greenery of that fair place again. What a contrast to the bleakness of King's Cove, Nfld in winter. I was fortunate to be visiting Ireland during the warmest, driest spring they have had in half a century.
Mary's quest reminded me of my own serendipity in finding the last home (St Helen's, 27, Holland Park, Knock, County Down, originally built for managers of Harland and Wolfe, the shipbuilders who constructed the "Titanic") of my mother's paternal grandmother, Diana FERGUSON (née SMITH)(d. 1923), within 20 minutes of my arrival in Belfast on the eve of my 44th birthday, which just happened to coincide with the beginning of a new, and, one hopes, happier, chapter in the history of Ulster as the next day, VE Day 2007 (my birthday) saw the beginning of a power-sharing government of Unionists and Nationalists at Stormont, the Northern Irish parliament.
After this very short half-hour of t.v. genealogy, I had just started in to watch Professor SCHAMA's "History of Britain" on the B.C.'s Knowledge network when the phone rang to interrupt his story of "The Wrong Empire".
It turned out to be a genealogical friend, Shirley GIBBARD, calling me about my father's great uncle, Christian ZUROWSKI (1863-1893), who arrived in Canada from Austria-Hungary's Bukovina in 1892. He did not survive very long in the new land, but his widow, Adelheid GAERTEL, survived him and married Shirley's great-uncle, Gervasi GEIGER, a native of the Hungarian Banat, and went on to have 12 children by him before taking her own life in 1923.
I had first been in touch with Shirley back in 1995. Now it seems Shirley had done more research and found the Hamburg ship's manifest for Christian and Adelheid, and, hey presto, two little girls, Elisabeth and Karoline, about whom we neither of us knew anything.
When I tuned back in to my programme, Dr SCHAMA had reached the early story of British India, and the notorious Robert CLIVE, general and victor of Plassy. He made a fortune in India and became a peer as Baron CLIVE of Plassy. He married a MASKELYNE, member of the family of the Astronomer Royal (and unfairly cast as the nemesis of HARRISON, the clockmaker, in the film "Longitude"), the Reverend Dr Nevil MASKELYNE, D.D., who is a distant kinsman of mine, and lies buried in Purton churchyard in Wiltshire where, close by, hidden by the sod, are the graves of two of my maternal grandmother's LARGE forebears: William LARGE (1679-1747) and Cis PHILLIPS alias MAJOR (1672/3-1757), whose mother Cisalia 'Sis' EARNLEE, gentlewoman, started me off on my ERNLE hunt about four years ago shortly after I discovered, via a genealogy.com membership, that Cis's maiden name was PHILLIPS (alias MAJOR) instead of HOLLIDAY (the name she bore from her deceased first husband at her marriage to my ancestor in 1703, a fact that the marriage register of Lydiard Tregoz, Wiltshire, had not revealed).
Later, I was back at my database to look at my father's side of the family before the 10 o'clock news to see if I could turn up any clues for Shirley.
News time rolled around and with it one of my favourite segments of "The National" featuring Chantal HEBERT (like HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, a descendant of Louis Hébert, New France's first habitant, one wonders?), and Andrew COYNE. The talk was of Stéphane DION's rocky first year as Liberal leader. When Peter MANSBRIDGE asked if anyone knew who the only Liberal leader since Confederation was who hadn't become prime minister, like Mr COYNE, I knew the answer: Edward BLAKE. Why you ask? Well, it's true I am a trained historian, but the real reason is genealogy. Edward BLAKE was born in Adelaide township, Middlesex county, Canada West, as was my maternal great-grandmother, Blanche Louisa BRAY (1845-1934), Mrs James LARGE. In fact, the two families likely knew each other fairly well, as they both attended St Ann's United Church of England and Ireland, the clapboard church of what was a small settlement of Anglo-Irish gentry (BLAKE's family included) and British half-pay army and ex-naval officers (Blanche's father, William BRAY, J.P., R.N., whose 1882 Adelaide "Advertiser" obituary credits him with blowing up the enemy's munitions store at the Battle of the Windmill which was the last engagement of the Upper Canada Rebellion).
So whereever I turned today, it was genealogy. Even on my walk along the seawall, I was engaged in a form of research; reading the names on the benches donated in memory of loved ones. So many of the names were Scottish, and included a plaque to a young man who had died in his late 20s, who bore the Scottish half of my own surname.
Genealogy: it can make the world seem very small indeed.
It began with my answering email.
A few days before, I had renewed use of my membership at genesreunited.co.uk. I sent out about 40 emails to people researching the surname ERNLE (also EARNLEY, EARNLY, and other variants) on which I am engaged in a One-Name Study. Now I was reaping the responses, and replying to them. It turned out that most people knew less than I did about the family. I have ended up as a bit of a world expert on this rare, possibly extinct (in the male line), English surname.
In fact, I have even written an article on it for Wikipedia under my nom-de-plume, Vancouveriensis, which is Latin for "of Vancouver".
I am trying to correct the pedigree of the family that has been published in "Burke's Landed Gentry", and by various genealogists over the years. It seems that noone has got the lineage right. One historian even had a man born in the 1540s as the paternal grandfather of another man born in the same decade!
I have been gathering wills and Chancery records as well as the more usual parish register entries to try to sort out the family's history.
My current theory is that all the families with names pronounced the same way, despite the wide range of spelling variants, are all descended from the same stock, which can be traced in documents, though not yet in a joined up pedigree, back to one Luke of EARNLEY a.k.a. Lucas de ERNLE who was granted land in the manor of Earnley, a parish on the Sussex coast of England, by his de Lancing relatives in 1166.
Of course, I didn't answer all forty or so messages all at once. Some of them involve quite a lot of work on my part to inform correspondents of what I know. It turns out that I generally know how I am related to them even if they don't know the connexion because they haven't looked into the family very extensively. It's a lot of work to survey a family tree over some 800+ years.;)
For a bit of exercise and to fight the middle-aged spread, I went for a walk along Vancouver's beautiful seawall for about an hour. One has to catch the clear weather while it's around at this time of year.
I returned to the computer for a while and then broke to watch the latest instalment of "Who do you think you are?", the new genealogy programme adapted from the British hit series, shown on CBC channel 3. This episode featured Newfoundland actress and comedienne, Mary WALSH, tracing her Irish roots from the Rock back to County Wexford in the late 18th century. I was in the Emerald Isle this spring for 12 days, so it was good to see the lush greenery of that fair place again. What a contrast to the bleakness of King's Cove, Nfld in winter. I was fortunate to be visiting Ireland during the warmest, driest spring they have had in half a century.
Mary's quest reminded me of my own serendipity in finding the last home (St Helen's, 27, Holland Park, Knock, County Down, originally built for managers of Harland and Wolfe, the shipbuilders who constructed the "Titanic") of my mother's paternal grandmother, Diana FERGUSON (née SMITH)(d. 1923), within 20 minutes of my arrival in Belfast on the eve of my 44th birthday, which just happened to coincide with the beginning of a new, and, one hopes, happier, chapter in the history of Ulster as the next day, VE Day 2007 (my birthday) saw the beginning of a power-sharing government of Unionists and Nationalists at Stormont, the Northern Irish parliament.
After this very short half-hour of t.v. genealogy, I had just started in to watch Professor SCHAMA's "History of Britain" on the B.C.'s Knowledge network when the phone rang to interrupt his story of "The Wrong Empire".
It turned out to be a genealogical friend, Shirley GIBBARD, calling me about my father's great uncle, Christian ZUROWSKI (1863-1893), who arrived in Canada from Austria-Hungary's Bukovina in 1892. He did not survive very long in the new land, but his widow, Adelheid GAERTEL, survived him and married Shirley's great-uncle, Gervasi GEIGER, a native of the Hungarian Banat, and went on to have 12 children by him before taking her own life in 1923.
I had first been in touch with Shirley back in 1995. Now it seems Shirley had done more research and found the Hamburg ship's manifest for Christian and Adelheid, and, hey presto, two little girls, Elisabeth and Karoline, about whom we neither of us knew anything.
When I tuned back in to my programme, Dr SCHAMA had reached the early story of British India, and the notorious Robert CLIVE, general and victor of Plassy. He made a fortune in India and became a peer as Baron CLIVE of Plassy. He married a MASKELYNE, member of the family of the Astronomer Royal (and unfairly cast as the nemesis of HARRISON, the clockmaker, in the film "Longitude"), the Reverend Dr Nevil MASKELYNE, D.D., who is a distant kinsman of mine, and lies buried in Purton churchyard in Wiltshire where, close by, hidden by the sod, are the graves of two of my maternal grandmother's LARGE forebears: William LARGE (1679-1747) and Cis PHILLIPS alias MAJOR (1672/3-1757), whose mother Cisalia 'Sis' EARNLEE, gentlewoman, started me off on my ERNLE hunt about four years ago shortly after I discovered, via a genealogy.com membership, that Cis's maiden name was PHILLIPS (alias MAJOR) instead of HOLLIDAY (the name she bore from her deceased first husband at her marriage to my ancestor in 1703, a fact that the marriage register of Lydiard Tregoz, Wiltshire, had not revealed).
Later, I was back at my database to look at my father's side of the family before the 10 o'clock news to see if I could turn up any clues for Shirley.
News time rolled around and with it one of my favourite segments of "The National" featuring Chantal HEBERT (like HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, a descendant of Louis Hébert, New France's first habitant, one wonders?), and Andrew COYNE. The talk was of Stéphane DION's rocky first year as Liberal leader. When Peter MANSBRIDGE asked if anyone knew who the only Liberal leader since Confederation was who hadn't become prime minister, like Mr COYNE, I knew the answer: Edward BLAKE. Why you ask? Well, it's true I am a trained historian, but the real reason is genealogy. Edward BLAKE was born in Adelaide township, Middlesex county, Canada West, as was my maternal great-grandmother, Blanche Louisa BRAY (1845-1934), Mrs James LARGE. In fact, the two families likely knew each other fairly well, as they both attended St Ann's United Church of England and Ireland, the clapboard church of what was a small settlement of Anglo-Irish gentry (BLAKE's family included) and British half-pay army and ex-naval officers (Blanche's father, William BRAY, J.P., R.N., whose 1882 Adelaide "Advertiser" obituary credits him with blowing up the enemy's munitions store at the Battle of the Windmill which was the last engagement of the Upper Canada Rebellion).
So whereever I turned today, it was genealogy. Even on my walk along the seawall, I was engaged in a form of research; reading the names on the benches donated in memory of loved ones. So many of the names were Scottish, and included a plaque to a young man who had died in his late 20s, who bore the Scottish half of my own surname.
Genealogy: it can make the world seem very small indeed.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Welcome and Join Me: Vade Mecum
A Genealogist's Vade Mecum...An itinerary of my days and nights of research
As with Mrs BEETON's books on 'Household Hints', you are invited to enquire within this blog of me upon anything and everything genealogical.
This is a first out of the gate effort for me as a blogging genealogist.
I started my interested in genealogy and family history at age 10, some 34 years ago. I used to be a stamp collector. Now I am a collector of genealogical minutiæ. I no longer bother with most other puzzles, crosswords, and such, for I have the greatest puzzle of 'em all to work away at to my heart's content: the human family tree.
My own corner of that great maze is occupation enough, though I do get curious about the genealogy of others. In fact, I have been known to investigate the genealogies of various historical figures and prominent people. It pays to be curious in genealogy. After all, we are all cousins at some remove, or so 'tis said.
Actually, I am my own cousin many times over, but that's another story for another day.
The fascination and preoccupation of genealogy never ends.
I hope you will come along for the journey, or a least for part of it...
Come along, come along, let us foot it out together!
Come along, come along, be it fair or stormy weather!
For it's heel and toe and forward, over bracken over stile,
And it's soon we will be tramping out the last long mile!
At least for today.
To adapt my maternal grandmother's saying: "Sufficient to the day is the challenge thereof."
Welcome!
From your webhost, and resident blogging genealogist/bloggealogiser
Richard:)
As with Mrs BEETON's books on 'Household Hints', you are invited to enquire within this blog of me upon anything and everything genealogical.
This is a first out of the gate effort for me as a blogging genealogist.
I started my interested in genealogy and family history at age 10, some 34 years ago. I used to be a stamp collector. Now I am a collector of genealogical minutiæ. I no longer bother with most other puzzles, crosswords, and such, for I have the greatest puzzle of 'em all to work away at to my heart's content: the human family tree.
My own corner of that great maze is occupation enough, though I do get curious about the genealogy of others. In fact, I have been known to investigate the genealogies of various historical figures and prominent people. It pays to be curious in genealogy. After all, we are all cousins at some remove, or so 'tis said.
Actually, I am my own cousin many times over, but that's another story for another day.
The fascination and preoccupation of genealogy never ends.
I hope you will come along for the journey, or a least for part of it...
Come along, come along, let us foot it out together!
Come along, come along, be it fair or stormy weather!
For it's heel and toe and forward, over bracken over stile,
And it's soon we will be tramping out the last long mile!
At least for today.
To adapt my maternal grandmother's saying: "Sufficient to the day is the challenge thereof."
Welcome!
From your webhost, and resident blogging genealogist/bloggealogiser
Richard:)
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