Blessed are the Bookbinders

I wanted to "take a post" to comment on how utterly entertaining Who Do You Think You Are? was this week.  Brian Blessed was a human demonstration of the usually private emotions attached to finding out about your ancestors.  His reactions were almost toddler like in their "up" then "down" qualities!  Bookbinders!  Stationers! Paupers!

I didn't blog about the episode as soon as it was shown because well, I felt that many far better qualified to comment people would be doing so.  However, having now discussed the show with friends and relations, I think it has been very interesting to see how "the subject" (i.e. celebrity) can really make the show worth watching.

We all will have heard about celebrities feeling the pressure to cry at the discoveries that are put before them.  A ten year anniversary show for Who Do You Think You Are?, shown a couple of weeks ago, again talked about this.  And indeed, hats off to any subject matter that can bring emotion out of Jeremies Paxman or Clarkson.  And for sheer boring reactions, I suggest watching some of the US episodes - a series of "oh really" and "oh wow".  No comments about Botoxed faces please....

The fascinating thing about Brian Blessed, though, was his sheer joy - not just the sadness.  And he was so overwhelmingly grateful to everyone that he met on his journey (even if he did comment on one of the vicar's weights!).

Family history can be a joyful experience!  It is not all about early deaths, destruction and other assorted disasters!  Yay!  Brian Blessed even made the best, Pollyanna-style, of his Great Great Grandfather having been in the workhouse - he celebrated the boy Blessed's ingenuity in escaping - albeit briefly - by focussing on what a character the lad must have been.  And don't get me started on his pride in the "randy" man with thirteen children - no thought for how the poor guy clothed and fed them all!

Maybe this is the way forward for genealogists.  Reports should show five positive facts before reporting the doom and gloom!  I have sometimes thought that Who do You Think You Are? has tended to make us think that we should be looking for sad family history from which we can take serious lessons.  "look how far we have come", "wasn't that [insert disaster] awful for them?" etc etc.

Maybe we should focus on the positives as little more.  I have a four times great grandfather, Solomon Major, who was a British soldier in India.  When I found him, it became apparent that he had had a child with an Indian woman and had then left India with his regiment.  Who knows whether he ever had any contact again with his Anglo Indian son.  So far, so glass half empty.

Clearly there was not joy for the family left behind in India - in fact, most probably not for Solomon in leaving them.  Yet if he had not gone to India, I would not be here.  His Anglo Indian descendents survived and thrived. 

A further check into what happened to Solomon, though, revealed that when he left India, his regiment were sent to St Helena - to guard Napoleon in his island jailhouse!  This in turn led to the discovery that Solomon was granted Chelsea Pensioner rights because of his service on St Helena.  He returned to Bristol and had quite a large family, from a first cursory glance at the records.  A story worthy of positive thoughts, in my view at least.

Glass half full is a good life motto.  Or if you are Brian Blesssed, glass brimming over!

Toy Story

I am just returned from a trip to London with my daughter and after quite some time in the Hamleys toy store today, I feel the need to blog about modern day toys versus those which would have belonged to our ancestors!

Don't get me wrong, we had a lot of fun in London.  And Hamleys is quite an experience in itself, regardless of whether you buy anything - although leaving without doing so is near impossible.  However, my sister and I were musing about how toys and marketing work these days.  For example, the whole floor dedicated to "girl stuff", in Hamleys, is pink.  Not just the stuff it sells but the décor as well.  A really worrying thing in Hamleys was that you only seemed able to get a toy hoover or washing machine or toaster (etc!) on the "girls' floor".  Actually the manufacturers had produced the items in black and red but small boys would have been unlikely to see the items where they were unless they had a sister who went to that floor.

I have never been one for the whole toy debate for little children.  I have "one of each" and they have both enjoyed all sorts of toys if given the chance.  However, it does seem that it is a vicious circle and marketing pushes people in certain directions for girls and certain directions for boys and it takes a strong parent to properly resist these directions as children naturally want to blend in with their friends and acquaintances and be "into" the same things.  My daughter was perfectly happy to use her brother's Nerf guns (polystyrene bullets, lots of fun) which are blue and orange until Nerf brought out Rebelle Nerf - pink guns!!

Loom bands have, this summer, proved to be a fantastic leveller when it comes to toys.  Every child I know - male or female - has loved the creativity provided by loom bands.  My children have spent many happy hours actually playing together for once to learn new techniques and create amazing designs.

But don't even get me started on the quantity of toys that children of today have.  Even the average child has more consumer items than whole families did in Victorian times.  Again, we were musing about this today.  As children of the 1970s. we were trying to work out if we had more or less stuff and came to the conclusion that so much more is available to children today.  They are a marketing department's dream audience.  Impressionable, pliable, they have nag power...!  Disney have made the marketing into an art form, unfortunately.

The picture above shows a couple of Victorian items which might have belonged to quite poor children.  But haven't children in themselves always been the same?  So much more is available to them now and income levels are so different, to say the least.  Yet those nineteenth century children must have had free time so what did they do?  Maybe, as I have posted before, they were all working at early ages.  I am sure that in a poor home, my ancestors would have had many household chores as well as possibly paid work.  And they would have known that money was not available for toys.  Plus their expectations would have been lower because of the lack of advertising and availability too.

What about the wealthy children though?  From trip to toy museums and stately homes over the years, it seems that even for these children, the quantity was not like it is today.  The wealthy would have seemed to have had a lot but I am sure that even those children would be amazed by what is on offer in this day and age.

I guess this blog post could go on for ages and link to my post about Scouting and getting kids outdoors and then link to the nature/nurture debate about how children are born into this world and whether toys condition them and then carry on further to discussions on whether children these days have too much, grow up to fast...  but this is not a parenting blog.

I just wanted to ponder on what I had seen today really.  An amazing toy store, a fabulous time was had but wouldn't it be fantastic to be able to show a Victorian child ancestor around our modern homes and see what they would make of it all?

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By the way, in the week that I chose to write about Cliff Richard (see my last post), it seems that he has hit the news for rather worrying reasons.  I do hope that he is not going to prove to be another ex-hero.  I do pick my moments to write, don't I?!

We're all going on a [Permanent] Holiday

One of the few mentions that my father made, during my childhood, of his Anglo Indian Roots was his claim to have "arrived on the same boat as Cliff Richard".  This is a claim that had long puzzled me as my father was three and a half when he and my grandparents took flight from India.  How did he know?  Had he read it somewhere?  Did my grandmother make friends with the family?!  I knew that my father had a vague memory of the Suez Canal but fellow passengers??  Well, thanks once again to the wonders of modern technology, I have been able to sort this little family tale out...

Cliff - aka Harry Rodger Webb - arrived in the UK from India by P&O boat but according to the amazing immigration records which are now available online, it seems that he arrived in 1948 to my father's 1949.  Furthermore, my father was on the SS Mooltan and Harry/Cliff was on the SS Ranchi.  So far, so myth...

However, Wikipedia claims that Cliff gets his dark colouring from a Spanish great great grandmother.  Hmmmm....

It must be remembered that Cliff became famous in the late 1950s.  He had been born in 1940 and by his late teens was doing his best Elvis impressions for British audiences (sorry, I know he has national treasure status...).  This was the time when my father was enduring, as far as I have been able to establish, quite a lot of racism in his adopted home town.  There had not yet been a great influx of immigrants and the Anglo Indians looked undeniably different.

So it is not unreasonable to surmise that any Anglo Indian in "Cliff" was glossed over.  After all, the same had been done much earlier in the century for Hollywood star Merle Oberon.  Looking at the few bits of available family history for Cliff, one can find the person listed on Wikipedia as Spanish using Find My Past.  Since she married a Smith, though, I have decided not to put any more time into trying to prove my Anglo Indian theory!  What is definitely true is that there were a lot of Anglo Indian Christian families with Spanish sounding names because they were (are) descended from Portuguese/Indian liaisons and marriages in the nineteenth century.  Santos, de Cruz and others are all often in the records....

If this is true, it is a great shame that Harry Webb, on becoming "Cliff Richard" felt unable to stand up for his roots.  It is entirely a product of the times of course and one can understand why he would have done it.  I do wish they could get him onto Who Do you Think you Are? though!  Be nice to know if I am right.  My father, of course, is convinced Cliff is Anglo Indian. 

And on a related subject, if you have even the slightest suspicion that your relations may have emigrated/immigrated/travelled abroad by ship, do look into the travel records available online.  Most have original images of the ships' registers.  These give passenger names, professions, ages, address that they are going to and lots of other useful information. 

If you want a "celebrity sighting", search for Harry Rodger Webb and there is "Cliff" and his whole family, arriving for a new life in 1948, a year after the Partition of India.  Good job that he did, my mother would have missed out on her first teen crush - maybe I had better check the photos to see just how similar Dad and Cliff were....

Sidetracked by a Scout

 

This is my very distant relation Francis "Skipper" Gidney.  He is indirectly responsible for taking my son away from me for a week!  He is also a very good example of how it is possible to get sidetracked on family trees if you come across a good personal story.  I know far more about him that I should, given the tenuous connection!

 

Francis Gidney was the son of another Francis Gidney.  That Francis was brother to John Gidney, my great great grandfather.  I have posted about John before but not about his siblings.  Francis Senior was in the British Army for his entire life, having joined up as a teenager.  There was another brother - William.  He joined up when  Francis Senior did although his career was neither so long nor so successful.

 

Anyway, this is a good time to write about Skipper Gidney as my son is away on his first international Scout jamboree and as it happens (did you guess from the uniform?!), Skipper was one of the first ever Scouts.  In fact, in 1919, Skipper was appointed as First Camp Chief at Gilwell Park, the new permanent home for the Scouting movement.  He was close to the Scouts' founder, Robert Baden-Powell and had founded, in 1908, one of the first Scout troops in the country - at his school in Lichfield when he was just 16.  He fought in the First  World War but was invalided out.  Although unwell for the rest of his life as a result of the wounds he sustained, this does not appear to have slowed him down - he developed the Wood Badge for camp skills and visited India for the Scouts amongst other contributions.  My favourite quote is "Gidney brought a touch of controlled lunacy to the place"1!  Despite a later disagreement with the Association, he remained loyal to scouting for his whole, sadly shortened life - writing to Baden-Powell on his deathbed in 1928.

 

My son has been through Beavers, Cubs and now Scouts.  This will be the longest that he has been away from home so far.  However, the opportunity provided by an international jamboree is hopefully something that he will remember for a long time.  This year, ten thousand people are attending, from all over the world.  There have been international Scout jamborees since the 1920s.  How many youth organisations can have sustained such loyalty?

 

There is of course the ever present worry about child abuse.  In these sad times of the aftermath of so many scandals, we cannot stop being vigilant because an organisation is well established.  However, if one can put aside those worries to consider what Scouting offers, I am a huge fan.

 

We are constantly being told that children should be outside more, should be away from screens, should be getting back to nature.  Yet at the same time, children's freedom is hampered by every tightening health and safety concerns.  A few years ago in our local park, the council chipped down all the hedgerows because they said children needed to be seen at all times by passers-by.  All they achieved was increased vandalism as drunks and others took advantage of the park at night, where previously they could not immediately see it and they could not climb in because of the hedges anyway!  I also had a run in with an official about tree climbing in the same park.

 

From the Scouting Association, children get discipline, camaraderie, outdoor and survival skills, a chance to roam and play outdoor games that have been played for a century, camping, cooking, you name it.  All with no electronic devices in sight!  [Although of course, the jamboree is tweeting and facebooking and I am anxiously watching the weather on my phone...].

 

Seriously, schools these days are often so tied up in knots over risk assessments and helpers that they just decide not to bother with any activity which is remotely risky or contentious. 

 

The founders of Scouting would hopefully be delighted and possibly amazed to know that their organisation is still going strong.  If you google Francis Gidney, the many websites which mention him say that he made an important contribution to the Scouting movement.  I have researched his life in great detail now (see what I mean about getting sidetracked - I have his schooling, his marriage, his descendents.... oh dear) and I am proud to even distantly be connected to him,  Everyone needs a "touch of controlled lunacy" in their lives. 

 

Oh, and below is the Frank Gidney Memorial Cabin at Gilwell Park!

 

1.  quote from The Twenty Four Years Hike - Charles W.Emlyn (C. Arthur Pearson Ltd 1932)

A Dog's Life

In a few short weeks, much to my friends' amusement, a black Labrador puppy is arriving into our family.  I say to their amusement because for many years now, I had sworn not to give in to the rest of the family's demands for a dog.  From watching my friends' experiences, it is clear that once the novelty has worn off, I am probably going to be the one doing all the work involved in having said dog!  Well, we do now live more in the country than we used to and since I am trying to write "properly", I am at home a lot.  So I figure that at least our new furry friend will get me up and out regularly!

 

Much to my amazement though, the breeder of the litter of puppies has sent me an amazing family tree for them!  I can't quite get over it actually.  As one keen on genealogy, who knows how difficult it is to come by information for human ancestors, it is really unbelievable to have a tree straight back to great great grandparents for a dog!  [Maybe I am now completely showing off my lack of dog prowess and "doggy people" know all about these things and think nothing of them...]

 

If I put the names on the tree into the Kennel Club website, I will apparently get all sorts of extra details about each dog.  Everything from their hip genetics to their prize winning activities.  And the "kennel names" are so impressive.

 

One of my first thoughts was "wouldn't it be amazing to have this sort of online resource for humans?"  Of course it would take the fun out of the detective work but how can we be so efficient for dogs and not for humans?  Obviously dogs live for a lot less time in human years so great great grandparents for a dog does not take us back a huge span of time.

 

But just imagine if this resource was available to humans!  We would have one place to go for births, deaths, marriages and everything in between.  Or would we...

 

The Kennel Club deals with pedigrees for dogs.  We call it a family tree but it is actually a pedigree for breeders to be able to match their dogs with the best possible partners.  What would this mean for humans?  Wouldn't this actually be a form of Nazi genetics or ethnic cleansing if such a database existed for humans?

 

If I apply such principles to my own family tree, I presume that a racist use of "pedigree" could or would exclude my Anglo Indian family from a "pure" tree for either Indians or white English.  We are mongrels!

 

So maybe it is best to leave the genetic breeding family tree for dogs and for us to continue to have the fun of the hunt for our own histories.  Now if  you will excuse me, I need to return to Pets At Home to buy the endless list of items required by puppies - pedigree or mongrel!

 

 

What happened to our family in the First World War, Mum?

This week has, of course, marked one hundred years since the start of the First World War.  The commemorations have been, in my humble opinion, very well staged - dignified and well thought out.  The picture shows Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, an art installation at the Tower of London by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper.  One of the many impressive tributes to the fallen of 1914-1918, at local, national and international levels.

 

CBBC has been doing a great job of helping my children to understand what this is all about.  They have always been fans of Horrible Histories but there have also been dramas and documentaries for them as well.

 

However, knowing my interest in family history, it has led them to many questions about our own family's part in the First World War.  And it seems, from what I can find out so far, that the immediate, direct families somehow did not have any real involvement.

 

My father's side, as readers of previous posts will know, were all in India.  There appear to have been a number of these Anglo Indian relations in the Indian Medical Service but I cannot find any evidence, as yet, that they served abroad in Europe.

 

As for my mother's family, it appears that my grandmother's side took no role - there not being many male relations.  My grandfather's father was a train driver so presumably his role was to remain at home and keep the trains running.

 

And my in-laws - my children's "other family" -  are Irish and do not appear to have been part of the Irish regiments that were raised, despite the continuing battle for independence.

 

So, a disappointment for my children's interest "what our family did" but obviously a good, if unusual, situation for the families involved!

 

The combination of these rather unusual family situations with an article that I read this week about the home services and their losses during the First World War has, though, spurred me on to investigate where Walter the train driver worked and to check more closely into the Anglo-Indian relations' service.

 

I do not like "presumably" and "seem to" - these phrases spur me on to find more definite information!  There is one place that I think I am going to have to start though and it fills me with dread in many ways.

 

My son, when aged 2-3, was a total train obsessive.  I understand that this is a fairly common toddler trait but given the many Anglo Indians who worked on the Indian Railways and also Walter's family's history, we did wonder.  Living in York provided the perfect place to satisfy all train cravings.  The National Railway Museum!  I knew that place inside out and back to front.  I knew every climbable footplate and every press-able button.  I could get round it blind fold pushing a buggy.... and that place gave endless (free!) joy to my son.

 

I have managed to avoid it in the past couple of years, especially once the "Wheel of York" was moved from its yard.  The article about the services recommends the archives at the museum though.  Who knew?  I thought it was just the hardware - the engines and the royal carriages, the turntable and the Flying Scotsman.  Apparently not.  Apparently it is a mine of useful information about those who worked on the railways.

 

Bet my son won't come with me though, unless they have the history of Minecraft too....  the train days are definitely gone!

 

 

 

 

Keep Calm and Keep Some Paper

I wrote this post whilst sitting in the wonderful institution which is Barter Books in Alnwick.  I have since been beset by tech issues (such as camping in a field!), meaning no posts for a few of days!  Sorry!

Anyway, a former railway station, Barter Books offers an amazing range of secondhand books along with comfy armchairs, real fires in winter time and lots of quirky features such as a ceiling top model railway, murals and many original station features.

It is also the home of the original Keep Calm and Carry On poster.  The poster, which was originally designed to be used in the event of German invasion during the Second World War, was discovered by Barter Books' owners, in a box of paperwork.  They liked it, put it on the wall and look what it has spawned!  A whole industry of "slogan ware"! 

However, the example of this poster is good demonstration of something which has been giving me thought lately.  With the electronic generations, how will future family researchers "stumble across" things?  And how will families make future discoveries like old tickets, letters, posters and be able to muse on their ancestors' pastimes or personal lives?  It is possible now to rarely even have to touch a paper ticket, for example - be it for travel, theatre or whatever.  And even if you print a paper ticket for a trip, it somehow doesn't look the same in a scrapbook or collection!

 

I had grandparents from a generation that still wrote letters and cards (no such thing as Moonpig.com to remember birthdays for you!), printed their holiday photos (however bad - you could not choose shots a la digital), etc.  Yet I still have precious little in the way of written material from them.  From my own parents, I will have even less - now that they have mastered email and text, even the rare letters from university days are no more.

 

What will my children have?  I have always liked to collect bits and pieces as life went along so there will be a few things.  But thanks to a parental divorce, numerous house moves and a '90s obsession with Feng Shui ("do you really need it?  is it dragging you down? etc"!), even I don't have that much paper left for them to ponder over when I am gone.

 

Last year, I went on a visit to a university student union for the first time in twenty odd years.  One thing that struck me was the corporate feel of the building.  This was partly due to a total absence of posters and flyers.  There were many ever changing screens advertising gigs, debates, societies, help.  But no paper.  Good for the environment obviously but what about when you want to prove that you saw [insert Band Name!] before anyone else??!  I can only presume that it will be photos of such events, stored on the endless "Cloud" which will provide evidence of such doings.

 

Historians dealing with "aristocratic" history have traditionally had far less problems with the social and personal lives of their subjects.  Families like the Percys at Alnwick Castle or the Cavendishes at Chatsworth have long had archivists.  But how will they document, for example, the personal friendships of today?  The current young royal generation are close to the younger members of the Percys.  Presumably they too use social media and email etc to stay in touch.  Will anyone ever have access to enough personal material to write a biography like Amanda Foreman's Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, which drew heavily on letters (and even those were censored by the upright Victorians!)?

 

I am seriously considering returning to a paper diary.  Not that I am expecting a biographer to come calling but I would like my children to have the possibility of finding something from my life.  And I just don't think my Facebook page, tweets or emails will be the same...after all, they really don't need to know "which Harry Potter character [I was]" (thanks Buzzfeed quizzes!), which clothes I ordered and sent back in despair or which comedians I followed on Twitter.  Or maybe they will.... and it is me that is stuck in the Dark Ages!

 

 

Both Sides of the Story

"In seeking truth, you have to get both sides of a story" - Walter Cronkite

A few weeks ago, I made contact with a very very distantly related person in Australia.  She is from the Guest/Gidney side of my Anglo India family tree and we made contact via some old forum posts that came up while I was googling.

To cut a long story short, we have been swapping various information and it turned out that she is in touch with someone who actually remembers some of my family.  The lady is very old and sadly quite ill but she does still love to chat about India apparently.

The picture above purports to show John Gidney and his first wife Margaret.  It was made available via a webite called  sirhenrygidney.net.  The site is run by a Gidney descendant of John and Margaret, as far as I understand it.  They had three children, Charles, Louisa and Henry, before Margaret's untimely death.  John went on to marry twice more (which is where myself and my Australian contact come in - from wife number two!), according to the site and to my research so far.  [Henry became a leader of the Anglo India community and fought for Anglo India rights to be considered throughout the years of wrangling over possible Indian independence. Maybe a subject for a future post!]

When I found this site, I was thrilled as it answered a lot of questions for me, as well, of course, as throwing up many more questions (always the way for a curious genealogist!).  However, the elderly relation in Australia recounted a somewhat different tale to my contact and after hearing it, for a while I panicked and wondered if I had been too quick to trust the family website that I had stumbled upon.

The site states that Margaret David's family opposed the marriage as although Miss David was Anglo Indian, she was highly educated and had good prospects.  The Australian lady recalls that, the way she heard it, John was not called Gidney until he arrived in India, having run away from Ireland and changed his name.  She also believes that John's family would have nothing to do with his wife as she was too dark skinned.

What to believe?  And how to prove the truth of the matter?  A real lesson in snap family tree decision making?  Had I been too delighted to find the family life story online and ready for copying?  

After hours more searching, I do believe that I have proved that the Henry Gidney site is more likely to be correct.  I have done this via the brothers of John who are mentioned on the site.  There are a number of people who have posted in forums etc that they are related to Sir Henry Gidney (quite a badge of honour apparently!) through his uncles.  

I can only hope that they have not stumbled upon the same site and made the same assumptions, of course.  I have as yet found no way to trace Margaret David's roots and that seems to me to be the only way to get closer to having both sides of the story.  Do let me know if you can help!

Memories are made of...what?

There is a large farmhouse in a small hamlet in Northumberland where my family used to stay when I was a child.  Actually, we did not stay in the house but either in a run down caravan in the garden or latterly in some holiday cottages in the farmyard.

A few years ago, when I started to go on holiday to the area with my own children, I decided to drive up and see the house that I remembered.  It seemed, as we drove, to be much further away from the main road than I remembered but we kept going.  As we rounded a bend, my husband was just starting to say "will you know it..." when I saw it.  Yes!  That's it!  And how did I know?  Well, topiary animals were all cut into the very high hedges!

If anyone had asked me "have you ever stayed somewhere with topiary animals outside?", I would have denied all knowledge.  I honestly did not remember until I clapped eyes on the house.  And as an experiment, I sent an untitled picture of the house to my brother.  His wife said "where on earth is that?" and without blinking, he answered "Mrs Murray's house" - again, not having previously remembered about the topiary!

So my question from this, looking at my family tree, is how many of the people on my tree, just two generations back, did I meet as a child?  And would I remember them if I was able to see them again?  I know for sure that I met two of my great grandmothers.  I also must have met most of my grandparents' siblings. 

Of course, most religions hold that we will see our loved ones again some time and I didn't write this post to start a religious debate.  Each to their own and leave it at that.  I just wish that I could remember some of the people about whom I am now writing and researching.

My Anglo-Indian grandfather had a cousin of whom he was very fond, surname Westerling.  When looking at the family tree, I can see that there are a number of reasons why the Westerlings were a strong connection, not least the coming to the UK when most of Grandad's family went to New Zealand.  We used to spend weekends with the extended family.  When my grandfather died, a number of that family came to the funeral.  I could not have told you how long it was since I saw them but I was able to introduce every one to my husband without thinking "who are you"....  How do our memories do this?  Such connections seem to me to be very visually based.  The sight of someone or something activates your memory.

The shame of this is that I cannot remember my great grandmothers or the others as I sit here now.  It would be nice, wouldn't it, to be able to reach into the depths of one's memory at will, rather than needing these external stimulus?

Of course, a life of balancing family arrangements and needs does tend to sap your memory powers to say the least.  Mine, certainly, have taken a battering...

Heir, Apparently

One of my guilty pleasures is the TV programme Heir Hunters.  I watch it on IPlayer whilst catching up with the ironing... sad but true.  I do switch off from research ideas sometimes, I promise.

For the uninitiated, Heir Hunters is about the companies that make their livings from specific genealogical research - usually in pursuit of the beneficiaries of unclaimed estates left by those who have died without leaving a will.

I am always fascinated by how possible it is, even in our modern world, for someone to be almost anonymous.  Today I watched an episode where the researchers had been unable even to find a photo of the deceased person.  Nothing.  How different to today's Instagram/Facebook/Twitter generation.

A couple of months ago, my aunt called my mother to say that she had had a call from an heir hunter.  It was to do with a relative of my grandmother's but the caller had given very few details on that first call and my aunt wanted to know if it was even possible that what they had said was true.

Well, far from being demoralised that I had not found this person myself, I was delighted with the challenge!  I haven't watched all those episodes for nothing, I told myself.  I do family trees but this was my chance to be a "proper" heir hunter - against the clock, unknown cash at the end.  Let's go!  Excitement for a Saturday morning instead of son's football and daughter's gym!

It turned out that the tree I had created for my mother and her siblings - of their mother's maternal line of Tiller - was the answer and that I had come very close to at least finding out about the existence of the deceased person when I first did the tree.  I had concentrated on working backwards and had not yet pursued the possibility of cousins for my grandmother.

Anyway, my grandma Lily apparently had a first cousin called Constance, the existence of whom we were blissfully unaware.  My uncle believe that the name jogged a memory of someone named Connie being mentioned but no-one else had a clue.

One of the biggest puzzles is that they all appear to have grown up in the same area of North London - Lily and her siblings, Constance and hers.  My grandmother even appears to have been named after her aunt Lillian - her mother's sister and Constance's mother.

Of course, people move on and grow up and, even within families, lose touch.  However, my grandmother lost her brother whilst he was very young and they had already lost their parents.  Her remaining sibling, a sister, also died relatively young.  So it seems sad that she and Constance were not in touch.

My mother and her three siblings will be sharing a small amount of money from Constance.  My grandmother died ten year ago and it appears that Constance did not long survive her.  Hopefully, by adding Constance to our family tree, we can preserve some small memory of her.  And I got to be a sort of Heir Hunter, even if only for a day!  A new string to the research bow?