NB: With Russia's unprovoked murderous assault on Ukraine, I am actively looking at alternative hosts for this journal, preferably those which will retain as much content as possible. I am very uncomfortable with being part of the Russian economic system at present, in however small a way. In the meantime ( Read more... )

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Idly filling in spaces in the family tree, which is about all I’ve had energy for of late, I discovered another celebrity relative, pioneering London gynæcologist Gladys Maud Sandes, my fourth cousin. Although she was born seventy years before me, in 1897, we are the same generation; her father John Sandes was born in 1868, sixty years before my ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:One concern faced by the Ryans was penal legislation, which dictated the Inch estate be equally divided between John Ryan’s four sons unless the eldest converted to the Established Church and became the sole heir.6 But Egan was not just concerned with legal interference. ‘I hope’, he added in his letter to Frances ( Read more... )

Sometimes in my browsing of family history I hit grimly interesting coincidences or anniversaries, and so it was this morning, when I realised that today is the 77th anniversary of the death of my second cousin once removed Gerard Ryan, aged 21, fighting in the Netherlands during the Second World War. His mother, Aileen Ryan née Grehan, lived to an ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third letter:It is hard to keep up and give you day-by-day descriptions, but it is better because I can't find time to write in the journal. By evening, I am very ready for bed. But I shall try to go back to where I left off at the last letter
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I wrote back in March about the mystery of the baby found in a Philadelphia park in 1917, how her children and I had got in touch through ancestry.com and how I had definitely identified the baby's mother, and also tentatively identified the baby's father as a distant cousin of my grandmother's ( Read more... )

On 31 May 1889, a dam collapsed 14 km north of Johnstown, in southwest Pennsylvania, and 2209 people were killed in the consequent flood. It was the worst death toll for a single accident in US history. (More died on 9/11 and at Pearl Harbour, but those were not accidents; and extreme weather and disease have also been more deadly ( Read more... )

The full title of this book is Statement and Correspondence Consequent on the Ill-Treatment of Lady de la Beche by Colonel Henry Wyndham, edited by Anne Auriol. The bulk of it is a collection of correspondence between the aggrieved parties and their allies; the second paragraph of the third letter (dated 20 July 1842, from Lady de la Beche to her ( Read more... )

I had a new DNA detective case last week. I connected via Reddit with a young woman in Las Vegas, who I’ll call Maria. She had done the 23andMe test, and was surprised to find that her ancestry was more or less exactly 25% African. Her mother’s family are of European descent, and her mother had always told Maria that her father was Mexican or ( Read more... )