My family and other dissolute, idle bear-baiters

Some years ago, Dad’s sister showed me how far she’d got with our family tree. She’d done brilliantly as it was all pre-Ancesty.com. She’d delved into church records, archived newspapers, and local record offices until she was permanently covered in dust. She got one branch back to 1745, when John Brooks (my maiden name is Brooks) married in a tiny village on the Somerset-Dorset border. I later found a local ‘census’ that revealed he was born in about 1715. 

Other than ‘John Brooks’, all names have been changed to respect the extended family’s privacy.

I took over the research and was having fun doing all the detective work and patting myself on the back because of the progress I was making, until a friend of mine said she was also doing her family tree and had found a possible connection to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s private physician, and another to one of the key figures in the Salem witch trials. 

Talk about bursting my bubble. Most of my ancestors were agricultural labourers. Not that my tree isn’t without some characters though, just not famous ones. Church records for the Brooks’s are incomplete and, while I can’t find where John was born or tangible evidence of his parents, circumstantially I’ve sketched his line back to an Eli ‘Brokes’ who died in 1655. In 1622, Eli was the subject of a petition by villagers claiming he had “become a dissolute and idle person, much given to drunkenness,” and “continuing to run a tippling house despite being ordered to close and by running bull and bear baiting … attracting a disorderly crowd.”

Hubby says I’m a chip off the old block.

Mum’s side of the family isn’t without its controversies either. I discovered that her Auntie Rose was really her cousin. She was born out of wedlock and raised by her grandparents, her actual mum masquerading as her sister who herself had been born to an ‘unknown’ father; her step-father, my great-grandfather, was also illegitimate. It’s perhaps not surprising that Auntie/Cousin Rose was married three times. Given that Mum was such a straitlaced, morally upstanding, Presbyterian-raised pillar of ‘society’ (not that there’s any such thing), her family history is rather incongruous.

I won’t tell you what Hubby said. 

The most fascinating, but sad, episode surrounded Dad’s family. His mum died tragically in 1943. Her father died in 1947, six days after Dad’s 20th birthday. His widowed granny went back to her native Scotland. A few months later she sent Dad a 21st birthday card that’s now in my scrapbook in which she wrote, “Dear Dick, just a line to wish for the old wish [sic] ‘Many Happy Returns of the Day’. Love from Granny, enclosed find £1.” She died several months later. On top of that, two of Dad’s paternal great-uncles, of whom he was very fond, died in 1945 and 1947. The latter was found dead in an ornamental pond on his Somerset farm, having committed “suicide by poison whilst balance of mind temporarily disturbed by over-work”. Not a happy decade for poor old Dad.

The year before my great-great-uncle killed himself, he made a grandfather clock, chiefly out of old bits of wood he found lying around the farm. This clock had pride of place in my grandad’s living room. At midnight, it would chime 12 times. Then a cuckoo clock would cuckoo twelve times. Twenty minutes later (I don’t know why) another cuckoo clock joined the fray with 12 more cuckoos. The grandfather clock is now in bits in my aunt’s garage. She’s desperate to get rid of it and I’m desperate to take it for sentimental reasons and have it rebuilt.

Hubby says not and is putting his foot down, but we all know I’ll get my way eventually.

Back to Dad’s maternal grandfather. I discovered that his middle name was Zimmermann, which came as a complete surprise to all the family. The unusual name made it easy to trace him back to my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jacob Zimmermann, who came to London from Germany in about 1800 and married a lass from Portsea, Hampshire. Although he married and had his kids baptised in the Whitechapel Lutheran Church, I’m convinced he was Jewish. I have some circumstantial evidence to support this theory, including a photo of Gran (who died in 1943); she definitely looks a bit ‘Jewish’. Someone asked me if Judaism was a race or a religion. Regardless, the Jewish theory is more believable than the DNA analysis that has me as 2% Polynesian.

My favourite conundrum must be the Stones who moved to a small village in Somerset in about 1730. Successive generations had loads of kids. In the 20th century, there were so many of them in the village that “you couldn’t throw a stone anywhere round here without hitting a Stone”, as my second cousin thrice removed used to say. Some ‘family weddings’ were therefore unavoidable. Take Great-great-uncle Harold Stone, who made the grandfather clock. He married his second cousin, Ruth Stone, who is another of my second cousins thrice removed. She became known as Old Ruth, because they had a son, who married his fifth cousin, also called Ruth Stone or Young Ruth, now aged 92, and she’s my fifth cousin twice removed. Ronnie Barker would love this!

Once when I was visiting the area, I had coffee with another Stone who wasn’t in my family tree. He gave me some details and when I got home I did some digging. Turns out he’s my seventh cousin twice removed. What that means is, one set of his great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents (born about 1640) are my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents.

I won’t tell you what Hubby says.

Perhaps my most impressive achievement was pushing one branch back by two generations from a marriage in 1603. Church records showed that Gabriel Ham and Grace Moore married in 1603. Dead end. Until, I was scouring the National Archives’ will index and saw reference to a George Moore who’d left some money to his son-in-law Gabriel Ham. Excitedly, I downloaded a copy of the will. Complete gobbledygook. Seventeenth-century handwriting, spelling and terminology. No chance. Luckily, I know an amateur historian who has some experience with old documents so she helped me decipher the will and whaddya know? George Moore was indeed Grace’s father! 

I hunted for other wills and found a couple belonging to Hams who I worked out were Gabriel’s siblings. Delving deeper into the National Archive indexes, I found reference to a deed dated 1584 in which an Edward Ham conveyed lands to his brother Thomas (described as a footman to Queen Elizabeth I – eat your heart out Bonnie Prince Charlie’s physician!) and other Hams. This document was only available at the Somerset Heritage Centre, so I arranged to view it and hot-footed it down there. It was in Latin. I haven’t looked at any Latin since my ‘O’-Level, when I only got a C-grade. Ah well. Being used to the old handwriting by now, I picked out names and relationships and key phrases with Google’s help and built up an almost complete picture of Gabriel Ham’s siblings and cousins, as well as his father (died 1585) and aunts and uncles. The royal footman was one of Gabriel's uncles, not his father, so I’m not as connected as I thought I was several sentences ago. Tentatively, I’ve identified Gabriel’s grandfather as John, who died in 1571.

I have another enigma that I've been working on for ages. Mum claimed that her paternal grandfather's brother was a Lord Provost of Dundee so he was the star of the family. I've found a list of all the Provosts but there's no Lister mentioned. None of the census documents or death certificates show that any of that family ever lived in Dundee. So I decided Mum must have been mistaken. Until today (which prompted this blog). Sorting through yet another of her albums, I came across a photo of a middle-aged man with a family resemblance, wearing chains of office. I won't rest until I find out who he was and which office he held!

Hubby says I’m a forensic nerd, at least I think he said forensic.