Confessions of a Family History Addict

A few weekends ago my partner, Simon, and I visited the National Archives.  It was a rare opportunity for us to spend some time there - a 13 month old baby isn’t really an ideal NA reader - so we planned to spend almost an entire day looking for that elusive information for our family trees.  The baby was spending the weekend with Granny and Grandad. 

The fact that we actually managed to get our little one fed, dressed, packed up and in the car by 8am was practically a miracle, and it could only be a good omen for the day.   

Our primary objective was to find the Escape and Evasion report for Simon’s grandad, Ronald Pither, whose plane crash landed near Krakow in Poland during WW2.  We found the index card almost immediately and excitedly ordered the relevant documents. 

Whilst we were waiting for the documents to be delivered to the reading room, we thought we would spend some time searching (again!) for my great-grandfather’s elusive WW1 army records.  Now I am more than aware that there may not even be any record of his service remaining but, being me, I wouldn’t be satisfied if I hadn’t covered every base just in case.  Having the name Henry John Johnson means that there are a huge number of possibles within the records, although I do know from my Gran’s birth certificate that he was a Private in the Army Service Corps and that he was discharged due to ill health some time before September 1918.  Unfortunately, having checked all the obvious places, this hasn’t narrowed the search down very much so I am slowly working my way through all the Henry Johnson’s to see if any of them are ‘mine’! 

The biggest problem I have when checking this information is that the microfilm readers give me motion sickness!  Strange, I know, but I really can’t help it.  Luckily, this time Simon was on hand as my microfilm operator so I only had to look at the screen once the correct range of names had been located.  45 minutes later and still none of the Henry’s were the right one so we decided to take a break (not least because I was feeling quite poorly despite minimal contact with the machine!) and see if the E&E documents were available yet. 

The documents were ready for us to view and we excitedly searched for the one relating to Ronald Pither.   We located it quickly but it was disappointingly brief with very little detail that we didn’t already know.  Still, it was really nice to have actually read the report and there were some fascinating reports from totally unrelated RAF personnel which made for very interesting reading. 

So it would seem that our day at the National Archives was not to be such a success after all, except that, as is often the case with family history, even the slightest chance event can turn the day around ……

We decided to go downstairs to the cafe to grab some lunch and re-read some articles on Escape & Evasion reports to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.  The articles indicated that there was another series that we could try which may or may not have some relevant information.  We went back upstairs to order the documents but unfortunately they were already being read by another reader.  We decided that we would wait for a while to see if they would be available in time for us to order them and in the mean time returned to the WW1 service records. 

Now I was feeling a little downhearted about my search for my great-grandfather, so we decided instead to look for my Gran’s uncle, Patrick Daley, in the hope that he would be a bit easier to find.    I knew from his marriage certificate, which I had ordered a few weeks previously, that he had been a Lance Corporal in the 1/4th Duke of Wellington Regiment at the end of the war so I assumed that locating his records, if they existed, should be relatively simple. 

 Oh how foolish I was!  An hour later and we had been through every single Patrick Daley with not one of them in that regiment.  By this time I was feeling extremely nauseous again and, with Simon gone off to check whether the E&E records were available yet, I despondently began winding back the microfilm.  

It was at that moment that the genealogical thrill struck!  Having a moment of particularly bad queasiness, I stopped the microfilm and looked away from the screen to take a deep breath.  Then, when I looked back again, as if by magic I read the words ‘Older Sister Helen Johnson …. Home address 10 Frankton Road, Peckham’.  Ellen Johnson (nee Daley) was my great-grandmother and 10 Frankton Road was the house where my Gran was born!  I felt like leaping up in the air and jumping around!  I satisfied myself with a quiet ‘Yes!’ and proceeded to read the 19 pages of information about my great-uncle and his army service. 

The contents of his records are a long and interesting story - which will probably be the subject of a future blog but I just wanted to share my excitement at what I found.  It just goes to show things are not always as they seem and you should never give up however slim the chance of finding something!     

It was my maternal grandmother, Ann Nora Moir (nee Johnson), who first got me interested in my family history.  We were looking at her wedding certificate one day and I noticed that her father’s occupation was listed as ‘fish curer’.  I’d never really thought about my ancestors until that point but this piqued my interest and once I got started, there was no looking back! 

My Gran’s parents died when she was very young and she was brought up in an orphanage, Our Lady’s School, run by Catholic nuns in Norwood, London.  As a result she didn’t really know much about her ancestry, although she had plenty of anecdotal snippets and memories of her early childhood, many of which turned out to be amazingly accurate! 

My research so far has concentrated on my Grandmother’s family tree and includes the surnames Johnson, Daley, Carmody, Richards, Ryan and Whittington.  With names as common as these I inevitably regularly come up against problems and seemingly brick walls but these challenges just make finding that next little piece of information so much more rewarding.   

I have to admit though that I do sometimes have to hijack other people’s trees to get a ‘buzz’ when my own tree is being particularly frustrating.  My partner is blessed with a lineage strewn with unusual surnames so researching his tree is always a good bet when I need a quick genealogical ‘fix’!  Luckily he is happy enough just to know the information while I get my thrills from hunting it down! 

I used to spend quite a large proportion of my leisure time researching my family tree but now that I have a 10 month old baby I find myself becoming a ‘5 minute genealogist’; grabbing every spare minute I can to continue my quest.  Even so, despite the never-ending tiredness of a new parent, I still often find myself sat at the computer in the late hours of the evening trying to solve the latest mystery. 

Up until now I have mainly focused on gathering basic facts and extending my tree backwards, but having read articles in magazines such as FTM and watched programmes like ‘Who do you think you are?’, I’ve realised that it would also be very interesting to put the lives of each of my ancestors into some context.  My first subject is my Grandmother’s father, Henry John Johnson, the fish curer.  Hopefully I will be able to share some of my findings through this blog soon.