Keeping the Faith
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My computer and I have been inseparable of late. A week ago, I started to explore a couple of areas on my family tree; those branches where the quest had gone a little stale and then, as is always the case, found myself waylaid by some interesting facts. You know the kind of thing: an ancestor with a few more children than you had understood; the family of 14 crowded into a one bedroom hovel (my ancestry is far from aristocratic); the uncle several generations back who made provision in his will for his servant's illegitimate daughter, only for me to discover him named as her father on her marriage certificate. So often, as in that last instance, instinctive hunches are proved true but on other occasions they are well and truly dashed.
This evening I was in the process of wrapping up my notes for the day when I ended up spending another hour or so at the screen that I had not intended. Keeping my records organised and consistent is by far the most onerous task as I repetitively record all kinds of incidental detail and on this occasion I could not risk the information escaping my repository of knowledge.
For as long as I can remember I can recall a story within my family as to how my grandfather, who sadly died before I was even born, had been forced to forsake his education in London to return to the northern village he grew up in, when both his parents succumbed to the Spanish flu epidemic at the end of the first World War. At 17 he was the eldest son in a large family where the youngest had only just seen her 1st birthday and I guess his intention had been to follow other family members, including his deceased father, into the coal mines in order to keep his brothers and sisters together.
Fortunately, so the story goes, the Miners' Union stepped in and paid to support the family so enabling my grandfather to benefit from a scholarship for Durham University to conclude his teacher training there. Whilst there was never any doubt that my grandfather qualified as a teacher, eventually rising to become a local headmaster, the notion that he had gone off to study in London at the age of 17 always seemed a somewhat mythical Dick Whittington fancy to me; an exaggeration through time of the true facts perhaps.
I do wish I wasn't so cynical but at least my persistence has paid off and today I found the evidence I have been looking for: a register entry with the Teachers' Registration Council. It confirmed not only my grandfather's status as a qualified teacher but also the colleges where he trained. To see Bede College in Durham was not a surprise, but there, just above it, was indeed confirmation of the accuracy of that family myth; he had begun his teacher training at St John's College, Battersea!
Oh me of little faith is now cock a hoop.
Comments
He also discovered skeletons in various cupboards, siblings born out of wedlock and others being locked up in the local nick for knocking the village bobby's hat off!
As for relatives doing the leg work for me, Treaders, I don't know what it was about my ancestry but I'm yet to find anyone with any interest in it. You would think that going back three hundred years, I'd have come across a few "cousins" tracing the same people but they are as problematic to find as the ancestors themselves.
However, any foreign ancestry of mine must be buried deep awaiting discovery, so no Trans-Atlantic or Russian historical visits on my agenda yet but how wonderful to hear stories of places handed down from grandparents to potentially be able to visit. Thanks for sharing that, B. Steele.