Tall Tales from the Trees

All those 62 granchildren of William Gurney conjure some riotous images of Victorian festive family gatherings at his house. Particularly a...

In 1848, year of pan-European revolution in whose turbulent events many of my ancestors were caught up and even played a part, the focus of...

Another gardener in my family tree! And another Austin Cooper, my 8x great grandfather. He’s known as Austin the Settler because he’s the...

--> My 5x great uncle is known in the Cooper family as Austin the Antiquary, to distinguish him from the more than twenty other Aust...

I came across one of those meaningless flukes of genealogy a few years ago, one of those entirely coincidental little loops of history whic...

I found a note amongst the papers I inherited from my uncle, from my great aunt Emily about a distant cousin John Salter, who “was head ga...

Amongst my 128 6x great grandfathers, Gurney was a miller, Salter was a brickmaker and Delap was an owner of slaves and sugar plantations....

The Gurney family’s attitude to my 5x great grandfather Thomas Gurney is full of contradictions. On the one hand he invented the system of ...

I’d like to know more about my great great grandfather Richard William Ralph Sadleir, but here’s what I’ve pieced together so far. Sadl...

Raking through the contents of my great great great uncle Charles Castle’s writing desk, I came across this furious letter to him from his ...