Gavelkinder

"But Grandpa - aren't we all related?"

Jake Wise (aged 8)

Welcome

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man of a certain age still in possession of his faculties may be in want of a hobby. However, little known the feelings or views of such a man may be, why should he not research his ancestry?

Having seen programmes tracing the family of people I have never even heard of, and failing to see - because I do not happen to be a 'Celebrity'-why my ancestry should not be as entertaining - or even more so. I thought that it might be something that I would enjoy pursuing - besides, it had the added attraction of being less expensive than golf.

With a nod and a wink to Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) and the Grossmith brothers (Diary of a Nobody), I decided to give it a try. Unlike some, who embark on such a journey, I had little family knowledge, other than names etc. of those members closest to me. After several false starts, I rethought what I was hoping to achieve and why. I abandoned what I call the 'big-chart' concept used by many ancestry sites, as they, in my opinion, fail to tell the history of the peoples, places, and events involved engagingly.

I decided that I would tell stories about the people, places and events that I discovered through my 'research' in the form of letters to my late Mother. You can read these letters via the below 'Letters Home' button.

"The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow"

GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN (1876 - 1962) ― AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN HISTORIAN"

Letters Home...