What's in your past?

[Def Cougar]

...So.... in my past...I was told by my parents I was 100% Irish...both parents being Irish on the face of it, even living over there during the production of some of their children. Turns out the stories my mum told me throughout her life in Sheffield hinted at intrigue, and the  illegitimacy of my grandmother, whose father was unknown apart from his name, and that he sailed from London to Simonstown in S Africa. So after my mother died I managed to research all her stories and found every one was true in exact detail. How 'word of mouth' should be trusted, as in those days that's all they had to pass on information down the lines. So I trusted 100% to that anytime I wavered about accepting one of two possibilities, and it always led me to the provable truth in the end.

 

I researched my granny's paternal line and found he was the son of a gentleman, whose own father and forebears were all legal professionals..lawyers, accountants, chemists, famous entomologists, and famous sea captains who sailed with Captain Cook! So it's certainly worth chasing up that odd cryptic comment made by your parents, aunts and grannies, you never know what you find out about your genes. It certainly solved the riddle of why I became a legal professional, and my mother was a wizz at mental arithmetic, yet she had no 'proper education' to speak of. The result of cruel nuns in a Catholic school.

 

Very interesting these genes.

[Bellatrix]

On 11/08/2024 at 13:25, Def Cougar said:

I researched my granny's paternal line and found he was the son of a gentleman, whose own father and forebears were all legal professionals..lawyers, accountants, chemists, famous entomologists, and famous sea captains who sailed with Captain Cook!

Now that's a past with some fascinating tales to tell, particularly the chemists and entomologists.

 

My tree is full of steel workers, iron workers, cutlers and a few miners.  Lots of the women worked in the cutlery trade too, and the tool industry (several buffers/burnishers, plus saw and razor etchers).

 

I'm the first in the family to go off to university, though that's much more to do with the eventual opening up of opportunities (and, crucially, student grants) than any sudden sprouting of suitability for academic life.

[Def Cougar]

Yes Bellatrix, no one was more surprised and thrilled than I was, it was a real 'pinch me' moment....series of moments really. Who knew that our humble working class family, in Sheffield by then,  could be directly related to such families, who also married into some other very important families when living in London, as they tended to in those days, particularly via their female lines. Rendering us blood relations to such folk as a Viceroy of India.  Gobsmacked doesn't really cover it. The lawyers on the King's Bench in the 1700s obviously arranged for their nephews in my line to be trained by their lawyer mates, and the choice  top jobs consequently came with that, and good marriages, to maintain the 'quality' as they saw it then.

 

Thank God for the records available on Ancestry etc, it would have taken all of my lifetime to accumulate all that information on an individual record basis....and way more costly. I don't begrudge a penny of my annual subscription, although the bulk of my family research is done now, I keep it so I can research anything at any time, and help others. Particularly in the tracing of adopted away babies. That is my passion now. I have traced several, the last of which was earlier this year, an 80 year old man in Edinburgh, who was fathered by my relative who was a Canadian pilot in WW11, who went down in the Bay of Biscay in 1942, leaving his pregnant girlfriend to bring up her baby alone. She kept her 'illegitimate' baby, and it was adopted officially by her subsequent husband, and they moved to Scotland. I contacted the adoptee 'baby' last year and told him all about his father, who according to his family, had intended to marry his mother.  The adoptee man's mother, out of respect for her new husband, had only told him his father had been a Canadian pilot who died in the war. He was thrilled to learn all about his father, and the photos I sent him, and so was his wife and children, who now knew their grandfather and his family.

[Def Cougar]

I do have a longstanding brick wall I wouldn't mind some 'paid expert' help with however, which I have delayed for want of knowing who to contact about it. So wouldn't mind finding out the contact details of the lady expert from that TV programme mentioned in an earlier post on here. She would be perfect for my particular query concerning some pretty old Tax Collector's personal details in the 1700s. I know they exist, because I have seen other tax official appointments online...just not my relative's one in the 1780s, which he held solidly in the same town until his death in 1831.

[Slighty batty]

4 hours ago, Def Cougar said:

I do have a longstanding brick wall I wouldn't mind some 'paid expert' help with however, which I have delayed for want of knowing who to contact about it. So wouldn't mind finding out the contact details of the lady expert from that TV programme mentioned in an earlier post on here. She would be perfect for my particular query concerning some pretty old Tax Collector's personal details in the 1700s. I know they exist, because I have seen other tax official appointments online...just not my relative's one in the 1780s, which he held solidly in the same town until his death in 1831.

What personal details are you trying to find, and what information do you already have? Maybe somebody here can help you. 

[Def Cougar]

Hi Slightly Batty

 

Trust me, I've been trying to find this info for 20 years, it aint accessible on line yet. So only a historical expert like the Professor? lady on that TV programme mentioned in an earlier post, who helped someone on here could help. They have secure/ special access as professional historical researchers to archives that we don't have access to yet. Maybe it is amongst the masses of files somewhere in archives yet to be filmed/ digitised. I wouldn't mind sending one of my London FHS contacts to wherever to search such archives, if I could just be told where to look and have a chat/ email with that lady expert before I waste time and money on that. I've spent thousands on train fares, hotels etc in the past and got barely anything back from the effort expended. I learned my lesson on that. These archives have so many rules and regulations, time regulations, and they are mostly down south where travel takes hours to get across London these days, only to find "they've moved that section to so and so". So frustrating! They are not geared up for folk travelling huge distances and having to stay overnight in a hotel just for a 2 hour access to a pile of files that in the end don't contain the documents you need. No I don't play their game any longer. I need an expert to go to the right archive, find the right file , and get the infomation I need. Like she does on the telly.

 

I just need to know her contact details. Money/ payments not a problem for an expert to give me advice or info. Its time to bite the bullet. She would be able to tell me if the files exist, perhaps where they are, if they were destroyed in so and so fire etc.  Or go herself and get me the info. I'm too old to be risking life and limb down south in the London area now.

[lobster]

Try The National Archives - they are usually very helpfull

[Bellatrix]

Still on the trail of the elusive Welsh ancestor. 

 

Would anyone like to have a go at working out what this location is in Monmouthshire in 1891?

 

[Guest]

50 minutes ago, Bellatrix said:

Still on the trail of the elusive Welsh ancestor. 

 

Would anyone like to have a go at working out what this location is in Monmouthshire in 1891?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_in_Monmouthshire

[Guest]

I must admit I can't find owt looking like that