Genealogy or How I am related to everyone

 

Every family has a story to tell and every family has the odd skeleton in the closet even if you haven’t found it yet, believe me it's there.

I first got interested in genealogy when I started researching Emily Hobhouse.  As mentioned in previous blogs I am half South African and half English.  

Due to the advance of the internet over the past 10-15 years researching your family history has never been so easy.  The UK censuses since 1841 are all on line and we are now up to 1921.  They will let you know all about your family, where they lived and what their job was.

 The English side of my family, the Masons and Jones, have been quite straightforward.  Mostly agricultural workers, waterboat coalmen on the Worcester to Birmingham canals, there isn’t much to find, or so I thought!  I have uncovered some sad stories, one includes an older sister of my Grandfather John Mason, who at the age of 14 threw herself into the river Severn in Worcester after being told off by her employer.  

On further searching of the newspapers I found the inquest report and also a letter written by my Great Grandfather imploring his daughter’s employers not to blame themselves.  

He himself died shortly afterwards.   Probably of a broken heart.  I am sure this was never discussed with my Grandfather and so the story disappeared with time.  Unfortunately there is nobody left to ask if they knew anything about it.

My Grandmother Mason’s paternal grandmother Esther Jones, was a bit of a drunk and ended up in the workhouse after spending some time in prison.  Newspaper reports also back this up but it was never mentioned in the family and I doubt it was even known by my grandmother.

My x2 Gt Grandmother Jones 1857 age 25

 My mother’s South African side was slightly trickier.  In the early days you had to visit the various authorities in South Africa to look at birth/marriage/death certificates and various other sources.  

     Many years ago I hired a Genealogist in South Africa who did this for me.  But, when I came to double-check it all  when the internet finally  exploded with  information and resources I found that the genealogist had made a mistake and was completely wrong.  With many thanks to the Latter day Saints, in South Africa countless  records have now been digitalised and I have managed to trace my South African side of my family right back to Charlemagne, the holy grail of genealogy.  My x32 gt grandparents are Henry II of England and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine.  It was made so much easier too because the Huguenots made many meticulous records and once I traced back to a famous ancestor the rest of the groundwork was done for me.  The most famous for me was the Huguenot Jacob De Villiers, who with his brother brought the champagne method of wine making from France to South Africa.  Incidentally, I also found a 9th Gt Grandmother was a Madagascan slave!

Huguenots arriving in the Cape 1688

The sites I use are ancestry.co.uk and familysearch.org, I also use findmypast.co.uk.  I also have a subscription to various newspaper archives like britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and newspapers.com.  I find it all fascinating.  I double check everything and I am always finding new stories.  In relation to my interest in Emily Hobhouse I have discovered many of my relations died in the British concentration camps in the Boer war.

this meme resonates with my close family

Even though cynics will say that in the end everyone is related to everyone, I still find the whole thing fascinating.