Tall Tales from the Trees

I wrote recently about the character-forming influence over my 3x great uncle Thomas Richard Guppy , a civil engineer, by his mother the i...

I recently co-wrote a history of inventions ( Everything You Need To Know About Inventions , out in April 2012!) and I can say with some a...

I was set off this week on a piece of detective work by the successive hand-written notes on the back of a framed drawing of an unidentifi...

My father-in-law talks about leaving things on the Too Difficult pile, and goodness knows that’s often a very tall pile when it comes to f...

My great grandmother Jane Reyner came from one of the oldest mill-owning families in the Lancashire cottonmill town of Ashton Under Lyne...

I have the contents of the writing desk of my great great great uncle Charles Castle, passed down to me by my uncle John Salter. It’s a tr...

John Salter, a cousin of my great great grandfather’s, was a pioneering horticulturalist. As a prolific breeder of new varieties he was in...

I’m a genealogist, not a gardener. There is a strained joke to be made about roots, branches, family trees, cross-pollination and bad appl...

With the help of someone who got in touch via this blog I recently found the identity of my 5x great grandfather, John Davis of Little Mis...