I started working on the family tree in December 2017, looking for a quiet pastime that I could forget in the New Year when paid work took precedence.
I happily made connections suggested by ancestry.com, guided by other members' trees, creating what was almost certainly a fiction. Through the family celebrations, I crept into my study to be alone with imagined long-dead ancestors, filling more than the gaps in festivities with a past that called to me.
Over time I became acquainted with the ghosts of real ancestors past. The process was not at all what I imagined.
I did not work methodically. There was no step-by-step process, sifting through evidence before reluctantly adding relative on relative in a slow progression.
Instead, I tended my tree with amateur enthusiasm - and it failed then grew, entire branches added in an evening to be cut away the following day. Imagined relatives discovered, then rejected as frauds, disinherited by inconsistencies. New and better ancestors taking their places, only to fall in their turn.
With time, the pace of change has slowed. I have developed a sense of what is right, and pruned accordingly, establishing something which I hope has sturdy enduring roots.
Artificial intelligence, now in evidence on ancestry.com, may well reveal where I have made my errors. I am sure they are there!
Technology
Technology is a powerful enabler for amateur ancestry research.
In the 1990s my uncle Graham Peck spent years painstakingly pursuing a paper chase across the home counties. Twenty five years on I have been able to retrace his steps with an ease that is assisted by algorithms and DNA matching.
It was DNA which revealed the Del Guerra's - see Valentine (bottom row, 2nd from the left) who was accused of murder by the New York police.
It was the network of site members which gave me a picture of Robert Peck, wife of Emily Richmond, who named their children Richmond Peck (top left, third to the right) setting a precedent that gave me my name. He built the east coast barges with their magnificent pink sails and flat bottoms that transported cargo along the rivers of the east coast from Newcastle to London.
It was the Harwich and Dovercourt website that taught me about Luke Johnson Richmond - and helped unlock a family fable that a relative had taken the German Ambassador back to Berlin at the outbreak of the first world war. (top left).
A researcher in Hong Kong revealed my wife Sam's grandfather who survived the fall of Hong Kong, transported away on the hell ship Lisbon Maru which was torpedoed by the US on the way to Yokohama. Japanese machine-gunners sprayed bullets at survivors swimming away from the wreck. He was rescued by Chinese who handed him back to the Japs, sending him to an internment camp where he passed the remainder of the war. His family learned of his survival through the Japanese notorious Zero Hour radio broadcasts in which he was forced to participate.
It was the internet which revealed my rather glamorous grandmother-in-law dressed in hand painted silks in 1920 at a wedding in Malta (far right), She was born before electricity was widely available, freed by the famine which allowed her to meet ordinary Maltese in the soup kitchens of Sliema, Malta at siege in World War II; and who died the same year I started my research, in a world which she could not understand.
But it was a scrapbook handed over by my uncle, Stanley Eaton, which introduced the real Eatons (my mother's family), their world a microcosm of an England unbalanced by industrial revolution. The Eatons fell twice and rose twice as they dealt with economic misfortunes and premature deaths brought on by the unhealthy conditions of industrial Lancashire.
In the end it was the availability of increasingly comprehensive digitised local newspapers which revealed the personal detail which is missing from official records. Colour.
The ancestry bore
I decided to publish these "vignettes" after attending a course at The Guardian newspaper in London. About a dozen of us met to discuss how best to write our family histories. In truth we were united in our common interest in our own family stories, and a polite disinterest in each others'.
For me (and them I suspect) the problem with ancestry research is that it fills one with a desire to tell family stories - but there are only so many times you can inflict them on those relatives keen to support you, but not as interested. For the lonely researcher there is only one place to go. The internet.
I have set myself some rules. I will pick out the stories I find interesting, and try wherever possible to add context through proper research.
I hope you find at least some of the stories of interest.
November 2019