• familyhistory

    A History: Ann Slater

    October 28, 2024 - By 

    Usually, when you’re doing family history research, you can just find bare bones of a life, the births, marriages and deaths, addresses and jobs from censuses. But occasionally, you find yourself finding a far richer story, whether it’s been born in a workhouse and left in England when your parents emigrate to the US, or dying after falling on own sword and being treated by Queen Victoria’s surgeon.  The stories are not always about direct ancestors, but their families, and they’re discovered as you’re trying to cross reference other information. That was the case for the story of Ann Slater,…

  • familyhistory - General

    A History: Florence Pashley

    October 3, 2020 - By 

    Florence Pashley was my great-grandmother and was one of the first relatives we started to gather information on way back in the 80’s when all of this research was done by occasional trips to London to the records office (in Islington at that point) and trips to local records.  A slow build-up of information that often left more questions than answers, especially when we could not find the next link in the chain. As I recall, it started off because granddad was never 100% sure of her surname, or rather the surnames of his maternal grandparents, (he was also not…

  • familyhistory

    A History: Jack Harrison

    November 12, 2017 - By 

    Time to explore the known history of another of my ancestors, this time great-grandfather Jack (christened John) Harrison. A fitting choice for a Remembrance Sunday weekend, being the only one of my direct ancestors that I know served in a World War. Jack was born 29 April 1899, at 33 Crosby Street. His father was John Harrison, a Journeyman Hatter at the time; his mother was Hannah Harwood. I’ve previously explored the life of his father John, in another post. John, known for most of his life as Jack, was the 3rd surviving child out of 9; he was also…

  • familyhistory

    A History: John Harrison

    May 28, 2016 - By 

    For around 30 years, I’ve been slowly building up what I know about my family history. Starting from occasional visits to the Family Record office in London with Mom, to look things up and order new records it slowly moved to online research as records were digitised and most of it can now be done from a computer. I say most, but sometimes you do need to get out and dig into local records, especially those of pre 1837, before national registration was implemented. In this post, I’m going to explore what I know about a single ancestor, my great-great-grandfather…