Tall Tales from the Trees

“Chum” isn’t a word you see in print very often. But there it is in the Ayrshire Post’s report of the funeral of Hugh Piper, my grandmo...

When my ancestral cousin the British MP Russell Gurney died in 1878, he rather surprisingly received a transatlantic obituary from the ...

My great uncle Tudor looks strained and miserable in his official army portrait. He enlisted in 1915, but army life cannot possibly hav...

“Polymath” is the word regularly applied to my 3x great uncle John. He turned his agile mind to everything from translation to devising...

I wrote earlier about my 3x great uncle Thomas’s contribution to the career of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, of whom he was a lifelong friend a...

My 4x great uncle Richard Chadwick was murdered in circumstances remarkably similar to those surrounding the death of his cousins Austi...

They say that Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations are variations on a theme which itself never appears. Instead, the music dances around a...

I began this blog as a way of preserving my family history research for a time when my young nephews and nieces became interested in it...

I’ve written before about Killenure Castle, my ancestral home . Sadly for me (and the rest of the Cooper diaspora) it had to be sold out...