Michael Sharpe - Family Matters: A History of Genealogy

To my mother, Barbara,
who showed me the meaning of family

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Pen & Sword Family History
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright Michael Sharpe, 2011

PRINT ISBN: 978 1 84884 559 6
EPUB ISBN: 9781844686506
PRC ISBN: 9781844686513

The right of Michael Sharpe to be identified as
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Contents

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people for their input and feedback as this project has developed. First, I would like to express my gratitude to Rupert Harding and his colleagues at Pen & Sword who have helped to bring this idea to fruition and provided sound advice along the way.

Particular thanks are due to Else Churchill of the Society of Genealogists for her invaluable assistance in locating sources in the Societys library, as well as granting permission to reproduce several illustrations from the Societys collection. I am very grateful to Gordon Honeycombe who entered into correspondence from his home in Western Australia and to Simon Fowler for reviewing the draft manuscript.

Numerous people provided assistance in sourcing images, including Melissa Atkinson of the National Portrait Gallery, Pamela Birch of the Bedfordshire & Luton Archives and Records Service, Patricia Buckingham of the Bodleian Library, and Matthew Jones of the College of Arms.

My friends Roger and Maria Hughes kindly accommodated me on numerous research trips to London and maintained an active interest throughout.

By far my greatest debt is to my wife, Kim. She has lived with the idea of the book since it was first conceived and has supported and encouraged me as I have nurtured it into life. She also gave valuable feedback on the first draft. In this, as in everything else, she has been my inspiration.

Abbreviations

Preface

GENEALOGY, n. An account of ones descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own. Ambrose Bierce, The Devils Dictionary, 1911

F or me it all started with a small spidery diagram sketched on a piece of brown paper. As a child growing up in Devon I was all too conscious that our familys roots were elsewhere. We had moved from Birmingham when I was 5 and some of my earliest memories are of walking to school through fog-bound Midlands streets alongside the construction work for the M6 motorway that was cutting a swathe through the city. The Brummie accents of our family and those who came to visit in our new Southwest home distinguished us as being different. One such visitor was my great-uncle Walter (Wal), my grandmothers brother. An inveterate smoker and tea drinker, he would sit in my grans kitchen recounting tales of people he had known from his childhood.

Like most Victorian and Edwardian families, his the Wheelwrights was a large household. I sat transfixed as he reeled off uncles and cousins, grandfathers and stepmothers, and a host of other characters who did not seem to be related at all. There was his father, George Wheelwright, who had run a greengrocery business in Aston with Wals grandfather Josiah, and an Uncle Albert who had owned a fish and chip shop. Then there was Auntie Ellen who was big in the Methodist church, a cousin Arthur who had been killed in the First World War, and a whole series of bachelor uncles who were a penny short of a shilling and disappeared into grim Victorian asylums.

In my childish way I would ask Wal to explain more about these people and he would patiently answer my questions as best he could. Then, one day I arrived at my grandmothers to find he had drawn out a crude family tree. On a strip of brown parcel paper the biggest sheet of paper he could find he had drawn long straight lines off which were spurs with peoples names. Here, at last, were George and Josiah, Albert, Ellen, Arthur and a host of others arranged in family groups, showing the progression of the Wheelwright family through the ages. To my young eyes it was a revelation. My family was not just me, my sister, my mum and dad and my gran: we were just one little sprig on a family tree that went back many generations. This sketch on a piece of parcel paper located me, in 1975, within a lineage (though I certainly did not know such a word then) that went right back into the nineteenth century. Even my very ordinary family, I now realized, had a history and without that history I would not have come to be.