family tree – Pete's Blog

I have written before that one of my hobbies is researching my family tree. This week I received a pack of old photographs from one of my Mum’s cousins. He has been tidying his house and knew that I am interested in the family, so sent them to me. He kindly annotated the backs of the pictures when he knew who they were, but this photograph was blank.

Most of the pictures are from the family of a man called John Davies, a distant cousin who was a chaplain serving in the Royal Navy, I knew the navy had chaplains but did not realise that they sailed on the ships for many months, just like ordinary sailors. John also served on submarines where he said that the confined space led to depression and need of a chaplain.

There were also photographs and newspaper articles about John’s relations. His father and grandfather were also priests, working in a small area of Wales. His grandmother was a very posh looking woman called Dorothy Jebb. She is my great great aunt and came from a very wealthy family.

But I am still stuck on this photograph. He looks a very smart soldier, I am guessing from the First World War. With three crosses on his wrist, perhaps he was a captain? John and his father both had low eyebrows, so it is not them.

In future times perhaps AI will allow me to search this photograph and find who it was, but for now I think it is sad that such a photograph, maybe made for a mother or sweetheart, cannot be identified. I will raise a glass to him.

This week I have been a genealogist. Several years ago I built up my family tree with the aid of the Genes Reunited website, stories from older relatives and lots of censuses, birth, wedding and death certificates, together with visits to graveyards and old houses.

I have not kept the tree up to date and decided to transfer it to the Ancestry.co.uk website, so there was quite a lot of work to do. I also recently received a number of old photographs – one pile from an old tin chest in my Mum’s loft, that turned out to contain all the papers left to my Dad when his parents died; one pile from my Mum’s cousin, who’s own mother recently passed away; and one pile from my wife’s aunt, who’s husband died last year.

It has been time consuming and a little bit obsessive. At one point my wife instructed me in no uncertain terms that I needed to come down for dinner, because I had been sitting in my study for over 12 hours without a break. But it has also been both rewarding and a little sad. Rewarding because I really find it exciting to find our new things and to connect with the past. If you have watched “Who Do You Think You Are?” You will know the experience. But what has been sad is finding quite a few photographs where I can’t identify the people. I have pictures that have been kept carefully for over a hundred years, but where everyone who could have identify them has now gone. Here are a few examples:

Some of my relatives – but who are they?

So this week, I have one request. If you have pictures or papers from the past, please annotate them on the back with the names of people involved. Please use real names, not things like “Grannie and my Uncle”. By doing so, future genealogists like me will be able to connect faces to names, and keep them alive in memories. Do it this weekend.

Tag: family tree

Who is this man?

How far back does your family tree go?