Tall Tales from the Trees

John Halliday, my 6x great uncle, was a very big, very rich fish in a small pool. He was the tax collector in St John’s on the tiny island ...

On Friday 7 th November 1851 , my great great great uncle Charles Castle hurriedly composed a staunchly worded petition of support for ex...

In 1848, while my great great great grandfather Brodie Gurney was celebrating the birth of six grandchildren, the rest of Europe was in ch...

There’s a wonderful short novel called “The Stone Book Quartet” by Alan Garner (incidentally the greatest English story teller since the Se...

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...