I’m currently catching up with a free FutureLearn course Genealogy: Researching Your Family Tree from the University of Strathclyde and thought that this oak in the Capability Brown parkland (drastically remodelled by the National Coal Board Opencast Executive in 1975!) at Temple Newsam this morning was perfect for a basic family tree.
On the course we’ve been warned about the dangers of getting sidetracked – in my case that would be my Truelove great uncles – especially one particular Great Uncle Joe who had a rather colourful life. Coming back to this basic tree with aunties and uncles excluded makes me realise where I need to put in a bit more research into the basic structure. I’ve probably got most of those missing great grandparents covered in my folders of research but this is all that I remember without riffling through the various census forms and birth, baptism, marriage and death certificates that I’ve accumulated.
But I do look forward to getting back to my ‘bad’ Great Uncle Joe and the wife, Mary Tinker who attempted to murder him . . .
We saw our first swifts circling over Nostell Lakes a week ago and, by coincidence, since then their namesakes, my mum’s family, the Swifts, have taken centre stage in my family tree research.
I’ve taken a break from genealogy since the death of my mum in February 2015; she was my last link with my Victorian forbears and I enjoyed updating her with some nugget of family history that I’d unearthed, especially any family scandal, such as an attempted murder.
I subscribe to the Find My Past and a hint in one of their regular e-mails set me on the trail again.
Missing Uncles
Maurice T Swift, Hayburn Wyke, c. 1928.
I’ve gone right back to first principles and and I’m building my family tree again from scratch, starting with my mum, Gladys Joan Swift. The orange circles highlight hints, which usually lead to census records or births, deaths and marriages.
More material has been added to the online resources since I started delving into family history eight or nine years ago, for instance the 1939 Register, which is the nearest thing that we’re ever going to get to a census for the wartime years.
Adding portraits brings the list of names to life and we’re lucky to have photographs going back over the last 150 years and even a few oil on canvas portraits.
I just found a picture of my uncle, Maurice Truelove Swift(above, right), sitting on the beach at Hayburn Wyke, North Yorkshire. Sadly I never met him as he died around the time that I was born.
Maurice Swift
In the family tree (above, far right), there’s an uncle of my mum’s who she never knew about until I started my research. Frederick James Swift was the eldest son of my great grandad George’s first wife and I’ve discovered that he emigrated to New Zealand. Quite why my grandad never mentioned him to my mum is still a bit of a mystery. A family feud? Or did my grandad, Maurice Swift, not renowned as a people person, never see the point of mentioning him.
Filey Beach
Robert Douglas Bell
Finally, here’s a photograph that I found of my dad, Robert Douglas Bell; he was a sergeant major in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War and I think that you can see from this photograph taken on the beach at Filey that, although most of the time he was charming, he could revert to his sergeant major assertiveness when necessary!
It’s good to have a portrait where, for once, the subject isn’t just smiling at the camera; this is very much as I remember him as he implored me to get to grips with my maths and English instead of spending so much time drawing!
LOGGING IN to renew my library books I noticed a link to a wonderful online resource that Wakefield Libraries have recently made available; access to the British Library’s digital archive of nineteenth century newspapers.
I tried a few names from my mum’s side of the family – the Swifts of Sheffield – and soon found this notice from the births, deaths and marriages column of the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent dated 18 November 1862.
Could my great great great grandfather really have been ‘present at the Battle of Trafalgar’ on 21 October 1805?
I’ve put in a request for the death certificate to check that this really is ‘our’ William Swift. We already knew that he’d worked at Joseph Rodgers from an obituary notice for his son, Samuel Burgin Swift, who followed in his footsteps there (as did his grandson).
My mum has the article, reprinted as a handbill;
‘he [Samuel] was a thoughtful, industrious workman, and inherited the skill of his father “Billy Swift”.
It seems to me unlikely that a young man from landlocked Sheffield would have served in the Battle of Trafalgar but Geoffrey Tweedale, author of A Directory of Sheffield Cutlery Manufacturers, 1742-2010, tells me; ‘Being at Trafalgar is not so strange — he lived a long life and his earlier career could have included military service. I’ve come across at least a couple of cutlers/silver platers who saw action during the Napoleonic War.’
Trafalgar Day
Tomorrow is Trafalgar Day, the 198th anniversary of the Battle. I hope that I’ll get the chance to search the records, for instance the Muster Rolls of the twenty-seven ships in Nelson’s fleet.
I still have this 1957 Ladybird book, a Christmas gift from our neighbours, Mr & Mrs Hudson.
Could that be my ancestor, hoisting the signal flags in the background?
I’M PULLING together my year of research into our family tree into a series of mini-biographies of some of the key characters starting with John Jones, one of my maternal great-grandfathers (left). He was blacksmith from Connah’s Quay, north Wales, near the border with England.
Tracing a Jones family in Wales is tricky as it’s such a common surname and so far I’ve made only limited progress. Now is a good time to go over what I do know and consider the questions that I need to be ask next if I’m going to take things further.
I’m using Apple’s iBook Author to produce an illustrated PDF document that I can e-mail to other members of the family and print out for my mum.
As it’s not for general publication so I don’t have to think about the wider audience or the limitations of print. It’s an opportunity to experiment with the design.
Blue Sky Research
I want to start with the basics and show John’s position on our family tree without all the subsidiary branches. I was considering a simple hand-lettered diagram but then I thought wouldn’t it be more inviting in a digital publication to have something in colour, something like the image that they use in the television series Who do you think you are?; an oak tree in a green meadow spreading its branches into a blue sky.
As I was thinking that I looked out of the studio window and saw a cloudscape that I thought would do just fine. I took a couple of pictures of it one with the exposure set for the sky, the other set for the wood, and I stitched them together in Photoshop.
So that’s my starting point; my mum, her parents and her grandad John. On average one eighth of my genes must come down from him.
The blue sky is a suitable metaphor for the blank canvas that you’re faced with when you start researching your family tree but when I think about times past I don’t think of a vertical axis, like so many in the west I’m in the habit of seeing action as starting on the left and running to the right and my image of the past 2000 years is of a band, like a film strip, curving back into the past.
