Seventeen years ago this week I fell in love with my house. After a very protracted moving process during which my chain free, mortgage free, in a hurry  buyer turned out to be none of those things, six months later, I moved in. It has been an honour to be the custodian of such a special property but for various reasons, none of which are connected to the house or the wonderful friendly village in which I live, it is time to go. What will I miss most? The garden, the woodburner, the privilege of living in a cottage that is almost certainly four hundred years old and belonging to a communi ..read more

Having left Sheffield we headed for Tredegar House caravan site, where we have stayed before. Turns out it isn’t in Tredegar, who knew? In my defence I wish to put it on record that it wasn’t me who left the book with the directions in at home. To add to the problem, we had accidentally pressed mute on the new satnav without realising it (this probably was me), so lacked verbal instructions. The Welsh detour was to see the Strictly Professionals Show (this time I was delivering a birthday present), so more angst about finding the venue. I was a little less concerned about accessing tickets via ..read more

Are you still there? I hear you cry. Well, actually I don’t but yes, I am still here. There’s been a lot going on lately, of which more another time but for now, I thought I’d share some details of a few days we recently spent on the Yorkshire/Derbyshire borders. We travelled via grandchild sitting to a quiet caravan site just outside Sheffield. This was in part to deliver a Christmas present in the shape of attendance at an André Rieu concert. Inevitably, this was accompanied by the usual angst – will we find the venue? Will we find the car park? Can I make the app work to display our tickets ..read more

For the past few months, I have been trying to discover that useful commodity ‘spare time’ and use it to create a small website to be the repository of all the family stories that run round my head. This is rather different from the family history accounts that appear on this website. These are mostly uninspiring narratives, designed to record all the facts that I have found for that branch of the family. The new website is for stories rather than accounts and in future, these will vary from long biographies to short paragraphs about particular anecdotes from the past. There is also a section ..read more

A few months ago, I was invited to give a talk to  London, Westminster and Middlesex Family History Society. They particularly wanted something with a London flavour. Nothing in my repertoire quite fitted the bill so I suggested, rashly, that I could put together something based on my Smith ancestors of London. These things always seem like a good idea from the safety of several months away. It should be easy. I’d already written the Smith family story. I even had a short power-point about them. I ‘just’ needed to pull together all the detail about the sources I’d used for the genealogy a ..read more

‘What have you been up to lately?’, I hear you cry. Well, actually, I don’t but I’m going to tell you anyway. I have been spending time with some drunken women, I should hasten to explain that this is in the historical, not actual, sense. Our Few Forgotten Women Team, aided by more than fifty helpers from all parts of the English-speaking world, have been tracing the stories of women found in two inebriate homes in the 1901 census. Their stories are mostly pretty tragic cycles of despair and degeneration but it is important that they are told. Photographs of many of the women survive in the on ..read more

It has been a while since I regaled you with news of my attempts to learn Cornish, mainly because ‘I’ve mastered a few more words’ isn’t exactly newsworthy. Questions are being asked, so here is an update. My second term of lessons has now drawn to a close, so I thought I should just put it out there that I am still on this adventure. I certainly would never have believed at the outset that I could amass a vocabulary of about 1000 words in twenty hours worth of lessons, especially as it took me about a month to get beyond the first couple of dozen. I’ll admit I am sometimes a bit hazy about pl ..read more

Firstly, I am now allowed to tell the world the exciting news that my next book is at the publishers. This is a non-fiction volume, commissioned by Pen and Sword, about tracing Marginalised Ancestors. So, my usual fare of tragedy and trauma, with chapters on Poverty, Criminality, Illegitimacy, Mental Health, Sickness, Prostitution, Witchcraft and more. Each chapter includes a case study and they were such fun to research. I can’t wait to introduce you to Sarah and Joseph and Charity and Harriet and Frederick and co.. Don’t hold your breath though. I am hoping that this may be out by the end of ..read more

On the third day of  RootsTech I had been really looking forward to Wanda Wyporska’s session (from late UK time on day 2) about researching women and was sad to see that it was not able to be recorded. As the custodian of ancestral christening gowns, wedding dresses and quilts Preserving your Ancestors’ Textiles and Handmade Treasures by Melissa Barker was another that was high on my ‘must watch’ list. Again, if you watch, you can skip the first 3 minutes 19 seconds of setting up chat. Sadly my house is too small to follow all of her advice. Interesting to learn that folded textiles shoul ..read more

The second day of RootsTech began, which meant an opportunity to catch the sessions that had screened late in the US day on day one, if that makes sense. I decided to take a look at the virtual expo hall. Unlike what you might be used to at UK genealogy shows, the vast majority of the stands that are available virtually are commercial, with only a tiny handful of society stands. A couple of the stands did catch my eye. Artifcts, if you can get past the spelling contraction, is a great concept, encouraging us to tell the stories of heirlooms. This is a lovely idea but I need convincing that you ..read more