Known but unknown ancestors

Recently i have been lucky enough to have found a few photographs of some of my ancestors taken in the interwar period. The first photo is of my Great Aunt Annie and Great Uncle Leslie (plus a dog, name unknown). Annie lived very close to where i live now literally a few hundred metres away (though the street her house was on no longer exists) so it is likely the photo was also taken in the area.

Although i have heard stories about Leslie, who was my Nan's younger brother, i never met him (he died not long after i was born). He was captured at Dunkirk and spent the war in Nazi coal mines, this affected him terribly physically and mentally i am told. I do have his last will and testament in my archives and he did not leave a great deal after he passed away. I know these things about him and his life but nothing from the man himself.

Despite all the information we can glean on our ancestors these days we still often lack enough to truly understand them, to know how they thought and what they were truly like. The NY Times has an interesting article on how the internet and social media will enable people to record so much about themselves and how they thought for future generations (though whether people will be that interested is another matter). For now though we usually just have to rely on piecing together bits of information with hazy memories (often second-hand).

The other photos, taken from Aston in the 1920s (or early 1930s) unfortunately have no names on them so the identity of these ancestors is unknown. Sometimes we just have these tantalising snippets on the past age. It perhaps means we cherish what has survived all the more, any future historians looking into my life will have to wade though hundreds of photographs of my dinner and blog posts on science-fiction before they can get any idea about me!

Disappearing surnames

Ancestry is warning that some English surnames are in danger of dying out. They compared names in the 1901 census with more recent records and found names like Hatman, Rummage (love that one) and Temples no longer exist. It says that names like Clegg and Greenwood are dwindling and one day could die out too.

But this is a process that has happened for centuries, names die out and names are also created. Some time ago i found a website (which unfortunately no longer seems active) that could let you map where a surname was common in the British Isles over time. I tracked one of my ancestral names (on my old blog) Genner between 1881 and 1998 to see how the distribution of the Genners changed over time.

Locating the graves of ancestors

As i mentioned in my brief history of Witton Cemetery my Great-grand father and great-uncle are buried there. A couple of years ago i went there to help my Mum and Uncle find a couple of graves. One was of their oldest brother Roderick Grant who died in 1935 while still a child and the other that of one of their grandmothers.

They had not visited the site for decades and had no idea where the graves were but thankfully the staff at the cemetery were able to quickly tell us roughly where the graves were located. It was still not the easiest thing in the world though to find the graves. Although every grave plot is numbered the number is only displayed in a headstone and not all headstones have a visible number. A lot of graves are not marked by any headstone including that of Roderick's. Luckily the grave next to Roderick's was numbered so we could find were he was. In the photo below he is (probably!) under on the right.

We think my great-grandfather Stephen Morris was buried here too though would need to get the cemetery staff to look up for us, they said there was someone else buried in the same plot. The next grave to look for was that of my great-grand mother Rose Eleanor Grant and that was much easier to find (once we knew what to look for). Like Roderick's her grave is unmarked though.

Researching my family tree - the Genners

This blog article is drawn from an original article on my now defunct history blog. It has been updated thanks to information from other family history researchers who were also researching the Genners. My thanks to them for helping me put together a more detailed account of some of my earliest ancestors.

A couple of years ago I started to research my family history. On my Mum's side of the family I had a bit of a head start as my Nan's sister's son-in-law, back in the 1970s, hired a researcher to look into this already so i got a bit of a head start with some old census results and my great-great-great-great aunt Sarah Ann's (think got the right number of "greats" in there!) baptism certificate dating from 1854 which was rather interesting to say the least. She was baptised in Jackatalla in India which nowadays looks like this and later census records say she was born in Madras (modern day Chennai).

My great-great-great-great grandfather Richard Genner was, according to these documents, a private in the 84th Infantry regiment serving in India and married to Mary. I'm assuming this is the 84th Foot (York & Lancaster) Regiment which was in India at the time. A few years later my great-great-great-great grandmother Mary was, according to the 1861 census, living in Kings Stanley/Stroud, Gloucestershire and married to a retired sergeant called Thomas Butler.

Richard Genner died in June 1854 with his age at death given as 36 (meaning he would be born around  1818). Why he died is unknown though he was buried in Madras on the 28th June. This immediately struck me as Sarah Ann's baptism was just 10 days earlier. Richard was in the 84th Foot when he died though he had been transferred recently from the 74th Highlands.

As for Mary it appears she married Richard in 1852 and her maiden name was either Macglen or Maclean with a father called William or John (there is conflicting information but this can be due to transcription errors at the time). She was born around 1826 in Madras. Because of this new information about Richard i am now wondering if he was Scottish. Regiments did tend to recruit locally (even today this is often the case) thus if his regiment was originally the Highlanders and Mary appears to have a Scottish name (of course the name doesn't necessarily mean anything but put two and two together). Mary later married Thomas Butler in 1857 and moved to England and the rest, as they say, is history...

MA Day school

Today i attended the first day school of my current Open University course (which is an MA in History of course), the day school was at the OU's HQ in Milton Keynes. This was the first time i had been there, indeed the first time i had been to MK! An interesting if slightly strange place to be sure, both the campus and MK! I of course got lost on my day to the day school (well its traditional for me, i just wonder how it is possible for someone to have such a lack of a sense of direction!)

The day school was good, though tiring, and i had a nice chat with my tutor. Unfortunately at the train was delayed coming back home due to some overhead line problems nearly Wembley (though in the end my train was only delayed 30 minutes). That meant i had time to have a surreal chat with a dopehead on the train platform, he was on the run from the police for breaking his bail conditions because he couldn't go back home because his girlfriend (who seemed also pretty drugged up) had burnt all his clothes and stabbed him. He was looking to go to Wales to hide, though got on a train for Glasgow. I think he was too high to really care one way or the other!

Upheaval upstairs and downstairs

The BBC have an interesting infographic showing the comparative family trees of the royal couple ahead of their marriage in a few days. Kate Middleton's family tree is interesting as on one side of her family are coal miners and general labourers up until the end of the First World War and manual workers up until the mid part of the 20th century.

It should be noted though that this isn't that unusual. The 1920s saw a great social upheaval with many families moving up (and down) the "social scale". Indeed some of this upheaval occurred in my own family. In the early part of the 20th century the Grants in Aston, Birmingham were fairly big wheels. They owned a bakery and had a rather grand house complete with stables, servants quarters (complete with bells), two sets of stairs et cetera. Where all that went is unknown, my Mum was too young to know what was going on in the 1930s. The Luftwaffe may have had a hand in it perhaps.

Mind you they still had some brass. It is a bit of a hackneyed factoid these days about the Queen's coronation and people watching it on TV in other people's homes but my Nan did indeed have the first TV in her street in Shard End (they moved from Aston after the war) and the neighbours did come in and watch the pageantry.