Family

Over the last few weeks I've started researching our family history (well I say I - my friend Martyn has done pretty much all of it as he's researched his own family tree and has the ability to find things on databases that I lack!) .

I've never had any great desire to know who my ancestors back in 1421 were or how they lived, but the more recent family history has always fascinated me. Nana always used to tell us about how her mother was bedbound and yet still raised a large family and cooked, ironed and generally ran the house from her bed. I always wondered why she had been confined to bed and whether that would have been the case today. Whilst looking for some family photographs recently I came across newspaper cuttings from 1953 about how she went to visit the Isle of Man as a guest of the tourist board. (if you click on the picture you can enlarge it)

I started wondering about what sort of life she had led - whether she had brothers and sisters, what her relationship was like with her parents and what she would think of the family if she was still alive today. One of Mum's cousins had written an amazing letter giving as much detail of the family and relations as she could remember, which gave us a great starting point. We've managed to get a copy of her birth & marriage certificate. It's amazing to see a facsimile of the actual entries, the handwriting and the clues it gives us about life at that time. We've also found her family on the 1901 and 1891 census, and again the information is amazing. You can see how much the area was dependent on the textile industry. Occupations listed on the pages we've been looking at include cotton spinner, cotton weaver, calico weaver, velvet stiffener and cotton minder.

Going back in the census to her mother's family - we've discovered that in 1861 the family were living in a cellar with another family and you can see how they literally moved up in the world - by 1871 they appear to be living in a house. I don't feel that at this stage I want to go any further back than that point. Knowing who my great great grandparents were is about the limit of them feeling like real people who have shaped the family I've been brought up in.

So the aim is to get back to that stage on all branches of the family tree. We've been asking all the relatives we can think of if they've got any information about the family history. Trying to collate it all in a way that makes sense to me is a huge undertaking and needs a very, very, very, very large sheet of paper!