Two weeks ago today, we were privileged to spend the weekend doing living history at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, where William Wordsworth and his family lived from 1799-1808. Wordsworth was a revolutionary; writing about ordinary people going about their everyday lives; finding poetry in the mundane and his environment. He wrote about beggars, leech-gatherers, the disenfranchised, […]
Category: Genealogy
“Is it a Memorial about his own history that he is writing, aunt?’ ‘Yes, child,’ said my aunt, rubbing her nose again. ‘He is memorializing the Lord Chancellor, or the Lord Somebody or other—one of those people, at all events, who are paid to be memorialized—about his affairs. I suppose it will go in, one […]
When I went to see ‘War Horse’ recently, I thought of Uncle Jesse, famously a stunt rider in early films and trainer of horses for the Yorkshire Hussars. Last year, a fellow Boothman descendant had sent me some amazing photos of Great Uncle Jesse in WW1, training horses for the Front. The lovely Amanda Carter […]
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Sweet Charity..?
Just a quick heads-up for the knitters and the genealogists. This month’s ‘Family Tree Magazine’ is running one I made earlier; ‘Skills for Life’, an article about our charity school ancestors. This is a fraction of the stuff I stumbled on, but has plenty of interest in it for both knitters and family historians; I […]
Apologies to descendents of George Debnam, who may stumble on this. Not sure how I’d feel if this was my ancestor – yet it is one intriguing aspect to genealogy.You never really know what you’re going to find. I wanted to find out more about the man my ancestor John Fisher was (allegedly) assaulted by, […]
My favourite ancestor, John Fisher, has just done it again, and given me another glimpse into his life, and personality. And what a personality. I thought I had found everything there was to find, on John. After all, few 19thC farm labourers left much of a paper trail. I counted myself lucky to find his […]
Here’s Lewis Harding’s 1870 (ish) image of two little Polperro girls, Mary Jane Langmaid and Elizabeth Joliff, knitting. This is the iconic photo for people interested in the history of traditional knitting. A couple of people used it in their presentations at Ganseyfest, and folk wondered if the photo was staged. One or two even […]
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“We were the singers…”
““I am a labourer, and reside at Stillingfleet; I am one of the singers at the parish church, and went along with the deceased persons … to sing the Christmas hymn … We were the singers at Stillingfleet church…”
How often do you find a direct line ancestor mentioned in a book? Judging by what I found yesterday – it’s not always a desirable thing. I was killing time at York Library yesterday after a fun morning at the dentist’s, waiting for my lift home, when I spied this on the Local History shelf, […]
It looks like I’ve been neglecting the knitters for the genealogists here, so I wanted to post today just for the patient knitsters. Here are the famous Hawes knitters from ‘The Costume of Yorkshire Illustrated By A Series of Forty Engravings Being Fac-Similies of Original Drawings’ By George Walker, 1814. I do so love a […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 