Time Flies! - Christmas Orders Are Open For 2023

Here we are again - thinking about Christmas.

I know, I know - it's October. 

But those extra-special gifts take time, and in order to get one of my packages ready for the big day itself, I need you to get in touch by 6pm GMT on 31st October 2023.

This is the Very Last date I can accept Christmas orders.

Earlier really is better, as it gives me more time to complete the research, and make your gift extra-special.

But, for those of you who aren't quite so on-the-ball (we've all been there...) I can arrange e-mail gift certificates right up until 1pm GMT on Christmas Eve (24th Dec.)

The last date for postal gift certificates is 10am GMT on Tuesday 19th December 2023 - this means I can get them printed & posted by the last post date.

My branch or double-branch packages really do make beautiful and thoughtful gifts, with the finished research coming in a lovely paperback book form (with other printing options available.)

For full details of my packages and services, see my website, familyhistorybycerys.co.uk

Those dates again, then:

• Final order enquiries: 6pm GMT, 31st October 2023

• Postal gift certificates: 10am GMT, 19th December 2023

• E-mail gift certificates: 1pm GMT, 24th December 2023

And if you have any other family history research enquiries, don't hesitate to get in touch and get your family history journey started!

Who Do You Think You Are? - Lesley Manville

 

This series of Who Do You Think You Are? finished off with the story of actress Lesley Manville's family.

Though a solid enough episode, given how many excellent episodes this series has had, it would perhaps have been better situated in the middle of the series. But that's just my opinion, of course.

Lesley's family tended to border on the non-conventional - on both maternal and paternal sides of the family, there were stories of couples who lived together but were actually still married to someone else.

Perhaps it's a sign of the upheaval of the times that they lived in - the period during and after the First World War for one couple, for example - that they felt able to live as man and wife, despite not legally being man and wife. 

Divorce was, of course, still strictly regulated, and inaccessible to many people.

Most of the episode, though, focussed on the life and fate of Aaron Harding, a participant in the Swing Riots that spread across the country in 1830.

The Swing Rioters protested poor pay and working conditions for agricultural labourers, as well as being staunchly anti-mechanisation, and often destroying farm equipment such as threshing machinery which they saw as a threat to their jobs.

The riots that Aaron Harding participated in seemed to be more about conditions and pay, rather than any real shift towards automation, and the ire of his group of rioters was directed primarily at the local workhouses, then known as poor houses, which represented the failing poor relief system at the time.

Due to the value placed on property over people in this period, the destruction of a house was actually a capital offense.

That meant that the penalty was death.

Luckily, Aaron's sentence was commuted... to transportation for life in Australia. And it's to here that Lesley follows his story.

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Chris Ramsey

Last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured comedian Chris Ramsey, who describes himself as pretty lucky.

Was his family as lucky as him? Well, they survived some pretty horrible situations - and that's pretty lucky, at the end of the day.

The luck angle is nice - but it feels a little bit forced in the editing. 

I think it's trying just a touch too hard instead of playing it cool - but that's just my opinion, of course.

Much of the episode was based around military careers - an ancestor who served in the Royal Naval Division during the First World War, and another who served in the Navy during the Second World War.

The Royal Naval Division was essentially the Navy's land-army - and it was this division that Chris' paternal great-grandfather served in.

Miraculously, he survived the action at Gallipoli in 1915, and missed the Battle of the Somme due to a case of scabies (...which probably didn't feel that lucky at the time, since scabies is pretty gruesome, but probably was grateful for in the end.)

Chris also looked into his grandfather's war service in the Second World War.

As well as being part of the gruelling Arctic convoys - and receiving a Russian medal for his service - Alf Ramsey was one of the first people to visit Nagasaki after the detonation of the second atomic bomb.

Slightly lighter fare came in the form of a lottery one of Chris' ancestors entered - and won - in order to give birth in a charity hospital.

Medical care for pregnant women is now, thankfully, pretty standard, but it wasn't always so, and Chris' ancestor had to go through both morality-based interviews, and the lottery process, in order to have the chance of giving birth in an environment which had much better survival outcomes for both mother and child than most families could dream of.

Yet another reason to appreciate the NHS.

When you think of it, we're all pretty lucky to be here at all - given what our ancestors had to go through to get us here.

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Dev Griffin

DJ and presenter Dev Griffin's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? aired last Thursday.

Dev has clearly struggled a lot with his identity over the years, knowing little about his mother's Irish family, and even less about his father's Jamaican roots.

The Irish, (Griffin and Weafer,) sides of his family were, prior to the generations that Dev knew here in the UK, proud Irish nationalists.

As part of the Irish Republican Army (the IRA,) they were involved in the fight for home rule, and the Easter Rising.

(It's worth noting that this particular incarnation of the IRA came prior to the Provisional IRA - the IRA which most of us will be familiar with from news stories.)

Dev was interested to learn about the history of Irish independence from the Irish side of things - 

- history may not change in terms of dates and facts, but the significance and meaning of those facts can change vastly depending on the perspective from which it's viewed.

I always try to walk the line of perspective in my research in a way that promotes compassion and understanding, without flinching from the truth of the facts themselves, and for the most part I hope I achieve this.

The paternal side of his family saw Dev travel to Jamaica to learn more about his family there.

The pastor in Jamaica made for an excellent guide to the life of both the local church and Dev's specific family members who were, at one point, excluded from the church for 'fornication.'

...This was probably evident, as Dev's ancestor happened to be about eight months pregnant at the time of the exclusion. 

The couple ended up both getting married, and being let back into the church - so all's well that ends well!

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Emily Atack

Presenter and comedian Emily Atack had her turn at the Who Do You Think You Are? treatment in last week's episode.

Emily's family background is not necessarily the most typical - aside from the showbiz professions of her parents, most people don't have Sir Paul McCartney appearing casually in their family snaps!

Paul McCartney is the first cousin of Emily's maternal grandmother, and Emily grew up with Paul and his brother, Mike, as a present part of the family.

She even visits 'Uncle Mike' on-camera to discuss the family.

As such, the first part of this episode is a must-watch for Beatles mega-fans, with Emily providing snippets of Beatles history, and looking into the McCartney side of the family.

The McCartney family were, perhaps unsurprisingly, extremely musical - in a uniquely working-class-Liverpool kind of way.

(Though, I have to admit, my favourite part about this family was how Joe McCartney got his tobacco supplies for the week.)

And - shocking news! Their original name was not in fact McCartney, but McCarthy. Like many Irish immigrants, the name assimilated alongside the family, and became McCartney over time.

This was one of those episodes with so much to cram in that we didn't get to really dwell over one family story for long.

In some ways this is a shame, as things very much had to keep moving instead of diving into a particular topic, but at the same time: who doesn't want their family to be full of interesting stories?

The rest of the episode worked hard to cram it all in.

In short we had: links to Wrexham Football and the FAW, a champion whistler (yes, that's a thing,) Butlin's, a mining accident, and, sadly, the tough topic of suicide.

 

This series of WDYTYA? has been excellent so far - let's hope it continues that way!

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Chris and Xand Van Tulleken

 

Last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured two for the price of one, with TV doctors, and twin brothers, Chris and Xand Van Tulleken.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chris and Xand's family turned out to be very Dutch in origin, though with a link to an exiled Dutchman living in England at the beginning of the 19th Century.

Working-class people are rarely prominent enough to be exiled, so it's probably no surprise that the Van Tulleken family was historically a bit posh - especially given the oil paintings of ancestors that adorn the walls of the family's home.

Although achieving a low-rank of nobility - something the brothers banter about quite a bit in the episode - the Van Tulleken family were largely of the merchant classes.

Unfortunately, given the time period and the history of the Netherlands, that led to a discovery of an ancestor who was heavily involved in the slave trade - not in a distant, though still deplorable, indirect way, either.

Ambrosias Tulleken was a slave-holder and trader in Dutch Suriname and Demerara, which is now in Guyana.

The brothers were understandably extremely shocked by the revelation, and very uncomfortable.

History is not always pleasant to the modern eye - it is what it is, and we can only learn from it.

A much sweeter story came from Dutch Indonesia, where the brothers found one of their ancestors had married a mixed-race Indonesian woman.

Despite Chris' initial cynicism, Xand's romantic theories won out through the historic sources - their ancestor had given up his army career because his intended bride's ethnicity was not approved of.

From their ancestor's own words, preserved in a book - something very few of us will be lucky to find, but an invaluable resource - it was abundantly clear that he both loved and respected his wife, and that her death affected him deeply.

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Kevin Clifton

Last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured celebrity dancer Kevin Clifton, known to everyone as 'Kevin from Grimsby.'

And while Kevin is, indeed, from Grimsby, his family history takes him much further away.

This episode featured one side of Kevin's family - his paternal line, whose history is mostly based in Canada.

And it's here that things get very interesting.

But also difficult - history is often uncomfortable, and this was something an emotional Kevin found out.

He lamented that it was 'always the men' in this ancestral line who inflicted the most pain and suffering on the women of his family, and had to grapple with being the descendant of both the men who caused the pain and the women who suffered from it.

A case of divorce in his family's past was covered in the newspapers - divorce being something highly unusual both at the time and in that particular area.

The press coverage was... revealing - with the husband taking a pre-emptive strategy, including denying - prior to any allegations being made - that he chased his wife with an axe and threatened to kill her. It's a very telling thing to try to get out in front of.

The abuse that was admitted to in court was bad enough, but considered acceptable at the time - it hopefully stands as a testament to social progress that admitting, in a court of law, that you had given your wife black eyes is no longer seen as a reasonable thing, and would now affect the divorce proceedings.

The main 'thread' of the episode, though, was the story - passed down through generations - of an Indigenous woman named Matooskie.

While it's not uncommon for families - especially in the US and Canada - to acquire a myth of Native heritage somewhere along the way, a specific name is much less so.

Matooskie, it turns out, was a First Nations (Canadian Indigenous) woman, who Kevin-from-Grimsby is directly descended from. 

A well-documented and somewhat iconic individual amongst First Nations historians, her story is even more interesting than my brief description of this episode (hopefully) makes it sound.

To me, though, what is truly important is not only that the story was passed down through the family, but that her Native name - Matooskie - is the one that was remembered by her descendants, rather than her Christian/European name of Nancy. 

It shows that regardless of her descriptions in church records as 'a half-breed woman' or her callous treatment by her Scottish husband, she retained her culture and her identity - enough to pass it down through the centuries.

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Bear Grylls

 

TV personality, and head UK Scout, Bear Grylls' episode of Who Do You Think You Are? aired last Thursday. 

The episode started by looking at his grandfather's work with the military, which during World War 2 saw him become an expert in tanks.

After the war, his grandfather remained in the Army, ending up in a joint American-British taskforce known as T-Force.

This was something of a murky group, ethically, being formed primarily to obtain German scientific, technological, and sometimes commercial, assets. These assets included experts who were often given little choice about working with the Allies, and also those sometimes forcefully recruited by British and American businesses.

It's a tricky thing to consider from a modern perspective, especially when there were clearly ethical questions raised at the time, and Bear Grylls did quite well to navigate the thorniness of it.

As the episode moved on, he seemed quite surprised at how posh his mother's family turned out to be.

It was quite surprising just how surprised he was, to be honest: I think that if your grandfather was the son of the headteacher at Harrow - one of Britain's poshest private schools - you're going to be at least a little bit posh, Bear.

It was this Harrow headteacher who also provided a link with the Scouts, having been involved with them in the early days - something which Grylls had no inkling of prior to making this programme.

The family on his maternal line proved to be even more auspicious in prior generations, with Bear Grylls discovering ancestors amongst the nobility and clans of Scotland.

This was a truly impressive lineage, leading back to Robert the Bruce himself.

But, more importantly for Bear Grylls, apparently, was the justification of him wearing kilts. He really likes kilts.

...Which is one benefit of researching your family history which I had not previously considered, but to each their own, I guess.

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Claire Foy

Actress Claire Foy is perhaps, appropriately, best known for playing historical figures in period dramas.

And while none of the family members who featured in her episode of WDYTYA? on Thursday were of the ranks of nobility - unlike Andrew Lloyd Webber last week - their stories were definitely drama-worthy.

There was tragedy in her maternal line - beginning with her charming Irish grandfather having lost his father at a young age in a motorbike accident.

That great-grandfather had, himself, lost his own father to a tragic accident.

It was this great-great-grandfather's accident that Claire turned to first - in England, rather than Ireland, to the site of a military training exercise which went terribly wrong, leading to the drowning of several men in a treacherous stretch of river.

Perhaps most heart-breaking was how close rescue could have been - the bank where their bodies came to rest being only a short distance downstream from the point where they went into the water.

On her paternal line, Claire turned to her father's biological family - the Foy family being his adopted line.

Moving further back in this line, Claire discovered an Irish veteran of the British army, who settled in Manchester.

She learned that he and his brother were arrested in Manchester in 1867 following an attack on a police van carrying prominent Fenian prisoners, during which a policeman guarding the prisoner transport, a Sergeant Charles Brett, was killed.

The Fenians, also known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, were a movement fighting - often via violent means - for home rule in Ireland.

Over 40 men were arrested in the days following the murder of Sergeant Brett.

28 men were charged with joint enterprise murder - which did not require the accused individual to have actually shot Sergeant Brett, but only that they were involved in the violent disorder that resulted in Brett's death; at the time this carried the death penalty.

To begin with, the case against Claire's relatives seemed suspicious, but as she learned more and more about the circumstances, the question became whether they were guilty... or simply Irish.

The addition of a police sketch artist to this episode was really quite entertaining, and added more realness to the story of these two men, on trial for their lives.

It's definitely something that the shows producers should consider incorporating in future episodes, where appropriate.

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Andrew Lloyd Webber

 

Andrew Lloyd Webber kicked off series 20 of Who Do You Think You Are? last Thursday with a strong episode.

Though it may have come as a surprise to him, many people would probably have assumed Andrew Lloyd Webber - a Lord who composed music for the recent coronation - had nobility in his family's background. He is, after all, very much an establishment figure - though his own personal background is far more humble.

His mother's side of the family, though, revealed a knighted hero from the Battle of Waterloo - commemorated in the official paintings of that event, no less - and, further back still, a woman whose wardship (essentially a form of custody for nobles,) was sold by Henry VIII to a man who would marry her in her teenage years. 

This was a state of affairs even the Spanish ambassador felt worth mentioning, since her 'guardian' and husband was in what we would now consider middle-age at the time of the union.

Her second marriage, after being widowed, appears to have been for love (and more power to her,) and it's from this second marriage that Andrew Lloyd Webber's family is descended. Things were not all plain-sailing however, with the family having to flee the country during the reign of Queen Mary I due to their staunch Protestant faith.

Further back, in Andrew Lloyd Webber's working-class paternal line, is where the most interesting stories come in, though 

- tales of show-men and musicians from the Magito family, making their names in the world of 18th Century European entertainment.

There were odd parallels between Andrew Lloyd Webber's distant ancestors and the lives of himself and his brother, Julian, Britain's most well-known cellist. 

Not least the existence of Alexis Magito - a Dutch cellist, often known as 'Mr Alexis,' who composed and performed in England.

While the other parts of the episode were entertaining enough, it is this last focal point of the Magito family that truly makes this episode fascinating, and well worth the watch.

Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.

Who Do You Think You Are? - Series 20

 

Who Do You Think You Are? is back tonight at 9pm.

As has become relatively common with WDYTYA? as of late, the advertising has been almost non-existent, but here's our new round of celebs:

• Claire Foy
• Bear Grylls
• Chris Ramsey
• Kevin Clifton
• Dev Griffin
• Chris & Xand van Tulleken
• Lesley Manville
• Andrew Lloyd Webber

- That's actually quite a sizeable series of 8 episodes; a lot of the recent series have been 4 or 5 episodes only.

Lot's to enjoy here, then!

I will be writing my usual write-ups after each episode, so look out for that.

I offer professional family history research services in the UK, check out my website for more information.