A small sample of a dress panel belonging to my great, great grandmother

I’ve reached that phase of life where family history seems to become remarkably engaging and despite paying scant attention for decades to stories held by my mother, a single snippet of unexpected information has taken root and grown in my head leading to fervent online archive searches to feed the growing tree of relationships.

Once statistical details of two or three closely related family members were established, those family stories came into their own by providing more specific identification and the stories began to fit together with the data – migration from rural Hampshire to London, hasty marriages and untimely deaths. This developing, and often poignant narrative fertilises the imagination until people who have just been names begin somehow to inflate into something more plausible, like the process of fleshing out characters in a book. Then with online access to archives of old maps, photographs and present day ‘travels’ on Google Street view, images merge to recreate Continue reading →