The frustrations of family trees


I’ve uncovered real mystery and curiosity-inducing snippets when doing a spot of casual data-mining for information on my family tree. While my father’s family name heavily populates the 1901 census in both SE and NW England, and features as witnesses and defendants in the public Old Bailey records from 1674 to 1913, my mother’s family name is a different story altogether, and appears comparatively few times in census records and not at all in Old Bailey records. What I have found perplexes me.

We don’t know any of those who appear in the Old Bailey records, although those convicted of crimes in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries were often poor—done for stealing loaves of bread, for example. This is no surprise: most of us have peasantry in our bloodlines, unless we’re from families of inherited wealth dating back a long time or from royalty.

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Thursday, May 8th, 2008

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