Looking Backwards – An Overview

A little over a month ago I treated myself to a late birthday present – an Ancestry DNA test. It arrived just over a week ago (from Germany!) and I dutifully spat in a plastic tube as directed and sent it off to be analysed (in Ireland!). I expect to get the results in Late July/early August. Naturally I’ll share things here when the results are in. What I expected, until recently anyway, was for the majority of my genetic heritage to be Irish with probably a percentage of Scandinavian thrown in. After all my father was born in Ireland and my mother has an Irish maiden name so….. WRONG!

As an additional sweetener from the Ancestry website they offered an introductory 3 month access to their database and family tree toolset for £1 (how could I refuse THAT!) going up to the usual £49.99 for a further 3 months from September. So, I thought, I’d dabble in my family history for 6 months and see what I can come up with in that time. The answer is: a LOT. Within a day or so of digging I discovered that nearly all of my assumptions had been dead wrong. But let me explain…..

I grew up in a family that didn’t have much interest in outside family members. It wasn’t something that we discussed. Sure I knew my immediate family but we were never what you would call close, especially after my family moved to their present location. So my knowledge of my family history was close to zero. I knew my father was born in Ireland and that his family arrived in England in 1939 and that was essentially it. On my mother’s side I almost knew as little. I knew my maternal grandmother was from Wolverhampton in the Midlands and that my grandfather fought in North Africa in WW2 and that was about it. Like I said – zero. But I had assumed that, because my mother’s maiden name was Irish that there would, pretty quickly, be a strong Irish connection there too. Oh, no. Far from it…..

OK, step back and BIG picture time. Starting from another low knowledge of the Ancestry ‘business’ I assumed that, if I was lucky, I might be able to push my family tree back to the first national census in 1801. That, I thought, would be amazing. Personally I was ready to settle at 100 years back and would call myself satisfied. So I started digging…. Beginning (naturally) with my parents. Now I knew so little about my father’s side that I had to ask my mother about them. Getting details of my paternal grandparents I managed, not without some difficulty, to push back to my 3^rd great grandfather born in 1820. Interestingly, but hardly surprisingly, my father’s family went back 200 years largely living and dying within a handful of miles of where my dad was born. I still need to do a LOT of digging on that side of things but, apart from the odd ‘in-comer’ from a different part of Ireland I’m not expecting any great surprises. What I would hope, indeed LOVE, to find is a connection to two people of my Surname who died on the Titanic in 1912. You will definitely find out if I come across THAT discovery.

The BIG surprise I found was from my mother’s side. Not only could I trace them back further – indeed MUCH further – but the majority of them had nothing at all to do with Ireland. The only direct line, in fact, to what I half-jokingly refer to as the ‘old country’ was through my maternal grandfather whose line goes back to southern Ireland for generations - indeed as far back as the late 17^th century with my 8^th great-grandfather born in Dublin in 1690. On my grandmother’s side of things the line goes initially to Wolverhampton and then onto Shropshire in the West Midlands bordering Wales. Following her line directly back through her father and so on I got as far back as 1590 all roughly in the same geographical area. So far so interesting if not particularly earth-shattering…. (apart from the fact that I managed, from my ‘spare’ room, in my stocking feet to track part of my family back to the ELIZABETHAN AGE!!!).

Of course being so close to Wales there was bound to be the odd Welsh connection and there was. A few names at first and then a whole LOAD of them, again from the 1500’s. One in particular jumped out at me – Sir Mathew Herbert (1536-1603) – of which more later! Another person jumped off the records because of her birthplace – Arundel Castle. Now I knew that people back then – she was born in 1609 – called their houses ‘castles’ in they had some crenellation and ‘looked’ like a castle from a distance so I wasn’t immediately impressed. So I Googled it – and discovered it WAS in fact a castle and a pretty big one. The other interesting fact about her is where she DIED – Massachusetts….. More later on THAT! Oddly I’ve come across several family members who died in the USA and several of which who died in the New World colonies prior to the War of Independence. MUCH digging to be done there!!

But I don’t want to give TOO much away on my first pass on my ancestry investigations. So I’ll just wrap up with a few first impressions. I was surprised (actually AMAZED) at just how easy it was to go FAR back in the records. So much so that I was a little sceptical about it all, thinking that I must be doing something wrong. Most of what I’ve discovered so far has been on the prompting of the website itself linking up family members that have already been established but I’m going pretty much on what can be said with a fair amount of certainty. If I come across anything even slightly questionable I reject it and park it for investigation so confidence is reasonably high so far. I am totally blown away by the fact that I haven’t just gone back 100 or even 200 years but, more than once, 500 years into Britain’s past. I’ve mentioned to a few people that it really connects you to history in a way that no history book has ever done before. If what I’ve found so far pans out then I have blood relatives who served ‘bloody’ Queen Mary, fought in the Civil War on the side of King Charles, and quite probably kept slaves on a sugar plantation in Barbados (I’m still processing THAT one!). It’s weird how REAL it all feels. I can certainly understand why people become completely addicted and obsessed about finding out as much as they can about their ancestors. It really does ROOT you in time (and place) in what is increasingly a rootless world. I’m SO glad I started looking into this. I’m both intrigued and a little apprehensive by what I’ll find next.