What did I know? Very little.
Both of my grandfathers died before I was born, and I think it was curiosity about them that got me interested in the whole subject of family history.
My father's father was one of a very large family. I was told "he was one of 14 children ... his mother wanted a daughter. The 9th was a daughter but died; and the 14th was a daughter". Not quite right. He was one of 11. the 4th died in infancy, but was a boy. The 6th and the 11th were daughters. The 11th, my great auntie Shirley, is the last of my grandfather's siblings still alive.
It frustrated me that, despite having this vast family, I never met any of them. I've met a couple of second cousins so far, and two of my cousins once removed, but that's all. Auntie Shirley has, however, given me a book which she originally compiled for one of my second cousins, with all of her brothers (and sister), and details of their various marriages and children and grandchildren.
My father's mother had an interesting middle name (Louvain), and I was told that she was named after the place in France where her father had served in the First World War. However, there was also a family story that her father had been a merchant seaman, who was torpedoed three times and returned to sea every time, but eventually died soon after the end of the war from the ill effects of his wartime experiences. These were obviously incompatible. They couldn't both be right. In fact, it turns out he was an Old Contemptible. He signed up a week after the outbreak of war, and because he could drive horses he was accepted into the ASC as an ambulance driver, and served with the 7th Cavalry Field Ambulance in Belgium in 1914. He was invalided out in 1915, and died in 1920. My grandmother was born in January 1915. The name "Louvain" is an anglicised version of Leuven, the site of the first great atrocity of the Great War, and many children born in late 1914 and 1915 were named in its honour. My great grandfather didn't serve there, however: it fell into German hands in August 1914, and my great grandfather didn't sail for Belgium until the beginning of October.
He MAY have been a merchant seaman at some point in his brief life, however. His army records record that he had a tattoo reading "I love Edith Sully". Alas, Edith Sully married somebody else, and soon after somebody by my great grandfather's name sailed as a storekeeper on a ship of the Union Castle line for South Africa. In the 1911 census, my great grandfather was living back in London, close to the docks, and his occupation was "Ship's Goods Checker". So it looks as though two family stories have become a bit garbled.
I was intrigued by a story which my grandmother used to tell of my father and his younger brothers getting lost in the woods, when my father was 11 and his brothers were 8 and 4. She received a reverse charge telephone call from a telephone box, and it was my father, and he said he didn't know where they were. She told him to read off the name of the telephone box, and to stay there, and she called a taxi to fetch them. When they arrived home they all had very muddy knees, and when she asked how this had come about my father explained that when they realised they were lost, he had made his brothers kneel down and pray for guidance "like you taught us we should", and then they'd found he telephone box.
What intrigued me there was that my grandmother was completely atheist, and I remember when she was dying my father had a big row with the hospital chaplain, because my grandmother didn't want to be bothered by him. So ... why had she been teaching her sons to pray for guidance?
It transpired that she was a cradle catholic, and HER mother (who died shortly before the events in this story) had been a devout catholic to the end. My grandmother apparently abandoned her faith at about the time of my father's birth, after an insensitive hospital chaplain had told her that she "deserved to lose her unborn baby for marrying out of the faith"; but it would seem that while HER mother was still alive she "kept up appearances" and continued to teach her children the elements of the faith. I would also hazard a guess that when she was admitted to hospital for the last time, she put "Roman Catholic" for her religion, rather than atheist ... and that this is why the hospital's catholic chaplain would have been attempting to minister to her.
On my mother's side, I had a few family stories which have been more or less validated, but not much. My mother thought her family was from Kent, because that's where her father grew up. Actually, they are from Huntingdonshire, and more particularly a village just 15 miles up the road from where I now live. On my first field visit I found my great x3 grandparents' grave (I visit it when I can, and like to lay flowers); and there is a brass plaque in the chancel of the church commemorating my great x3 uncle Harry Hardwick who was the organ blower there for 40 years!
And so I started researching ... and got bitten by the bug ...
