Tall Tales from the Trees

My 5x great grandfather John Templeman was from Torryburn in Fife, just west of the ancient Scottish town of Dunfermline. He was a damask w...

It’s been a while since I wrote about anyone called Austin Cooper – there are dozens of them in my Cooper tree, all taking their name from...

I’m a rotten businessman, and if I were a bookseller I would specialise in the entirely unprofitable area of old family bibles. Besides be...

At Christmas in 1848 my 3x great grandfather William Brodie Gurney celebrated the birth of half a dozen new grandchildren that year. This ...

Thomas Cooper Gotch is today an overlooked pre-raphaelite, impressionist and realist painter, who doesn’t even gain an entry in my Thames ...

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...