Luckily for me there is a book about living and working in the Dales and the demise of the industry which forced my family from my father's side 4 generations back to move to Essex and to set up business as farmers and builders. The family name can be traced back to the 1500 s , the end of the lead mining forced the the Race name to spread out from the north of England to far away places such as the US . Saved me hrs of searching the web .
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I had a tentative go at my surname. It's Scandinavian, so not many around....
I found out one ancestor was a pirate who lived on Lundy Island and raided commerce shipping sailing down the Bristol Channel.
The other was a 'Sir' who was executed for running a poor sole through with his sword, just because he wouldn't sit down and play cards with him!
I decided it best not to delve any deeper.....Comment
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Oh dear 570 I can quite see why.
I don't think we have any thing like that , apart from my great uncle who fired at a bloke on his farm for taking more rabbits than allowed !
His claim to fame was putting up a sign saying beware of snakes near a foot path through his land as he was fed up with people wandering around .There were no snakes but it did the trick !Comment
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Peter,
Yes, I found the 12 births in 10 years family after discovering the parents in two censuses, 10 years apart, with a son under a year old named John. Off to the birth records, and I found all 12. The mother died shortly after, in her early thirties.
My mother's father came from a small coastal town in south-west Wales, a picture-postcard sort of place with a harbour for some fishing boats. I didn't realise when, as a child, we visited an aunt's lovely cottage on a path to the beach, that 100 yards in the other direction was an iron works, and on the headland there was a coal mine. Looking at the census records for the village, anyone whose age was in double figures, male or female, was a labourer in the mine or in the iron works. The coal seam was only about 18 inches thick, so they employed children to work it to save digging out more waste material. That practice was stopped in the 1880s when a group of children, including a girl of 11, were killed in a collapse.
PeteComment
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If you think "570"s Scandinavian origins fascinating...I'm as Asian as an Asian can be but my family name comes from the same region as "570"s...Sweden of all places. Found out too one relative was in charge of slavery on an island between Denmark and Sweden. The Asiatic connection started during the great explorations and finding new lands and opportunities by the Dutch which gave passage to Europeans to settle in Ceylon now Sri Lanka in the colony of Dutch Burgers. My grandfather and his brother were great game hunters and travelled north to Burma where he found my grand mother and married her...both not able to speak each others language promising her father that he will take care of his other two little daughters...my grand aunties. The family settled in Malaya as the game was good. My grand father has written a book on Big Game Hunting in Malaya, I have an original copy which now fetches for about USD250 on Amazon.
The family name does have a coat of arms. I don't know where I have put the image of it. I do get updates on Geni on the family tree but haven't kept up.
Cheers,
RichardComment
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the late memsahib really got into researching the family tree.....went back several hundred years with both of us
i had a victorian relative who became the richest water cress (victorian fad food) farmer.......one of the first farmers to introduce steam engines into farming.......his death certificate had as the cause 'mysterious gun shot wound'
she had one in the late 1880s who sold dodgy insurance policies, did time in Durham jail, got a teenage maid pregnant and did a runner,,,,,,ended up dying in the Sunderland workhousePer Ardua
We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no ones beenComment
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My great-granddad was fined half a crown in 1906 for the heinous crime of riding a bicycle without lights. I don't know how our family has lived with the shame...
PeteComment
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I wondered that Tim. He ran a boarding house for seamen, and his wife ran a cafe, so maybe they thought he could afford it.
PeteComment
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I remember my paternal grandfather, then in his early 90's, shaking hands with me & saying ' in 1904 I shook hands with one of the survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade, and now I'm shaking hands with you!' I never really thought much of this, as my grandfather ( NOT a nice person ), was not the most truthful of witnesses - I did however find out - via a contemporary letter, that it was true, sadly not the name of the survivor. I was amazed to find that the last survivor didn't pass until 1922! Somehow time seemed telescoped by this!
Dave
edit - I did find this - I reckon this may have been the occasion that he was talking about.
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Dave, the number of Balaclava survivors increased with each passing year apparently!
Got back to 1745 with my lot. We’re all from Yorkshire, apart from one great grandad who was born at “Rose Cottage, Blackpool” in 1849. I’m guessing Blackpool wasn’t that big back then. Funnily enough on his marriage certificate his profession is ‘Model Maker’. I know he owned a clock repair shop in Haworth.
Re being related to Kings etc. I remember an episode of Who Do You Think You Are with Danny Dyer. He was chuffed to learn that he was related to Edward III. I don’t think any one had the heart to tell him that if your ancestry is white English you have about a 95% chance of being related to Edward III …!!Comment
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I had to check the story about shaking hands with a Charge of the Light Brigade survivor - my uncle had a named invitation card, and a letter written shortly afterwards to his mother, confirmung it had taken place in 1904. Sadly none of the documentation survived the passing of my uncle, apparantly it was all discarded! My Grandfather was a severe person, not very approachable & inclined to be rather sparing with the truth ( I had to look up his RN service record to see if he was actually at Jutland on HMS Monarch ). Later on in life, after the death of my Grandmother, several unsavoury stories emerged, about affairs & paying a troublesome relative to go to Canada. He'd fallen out with his two remaing sons, and I had the lousy task of winding up his affairs, after he went into a care home, even then he managed to rile me by messing around ( I had power of attorney ). Signng things without tellng me etc!! Sad to say, when he passed in his 98th year, I think most of the family were relieved. A real example of a Victorian Hypocrite
DaveComment
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