Tracing my Family Tree (6th May 2021)

 I’ve often been sniffy about people who obsess over their family tree. It always felt, to me, a rather pointless exercise to dust-off and parade your male ancestors from the last few generations when we are all pretty much related. I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. Every human who walked the earth ten thousand years ago is either a direct ancestor of everyone alive today, or else they are an ancestor of none of us. It’s true. Our most recent common ancestor, from whom everyone on the planet is descended, probably lived between 55 BC and 1,400 BC. We are all pretty close cousins. You and me and Kamala Harris and Xi Jinping and the Pope. We are none of us further apart than 27^th cousins, but we are almost certainly much closer than that. A shocking statistic for all those people who prefer to believe in racial purity or Brexit – but there we are. *

Anyway. This has always been my objection to family trees. Until I started to trace one. And almost immediately my opinion changed. Genealogy may still be wholly pointless as an exercise in understanding our biological origins. But as a way of uncovering some genuine family stories, it is extraordinarily fascinating. I’m a convert.

It started as a way to while away the long days during the first Covid lockdown. My wife, Sue, wanted to resolve a few puzzles in her family tree. So we started to dig. Ancestry.com proved to be really helpful. Expensive, but ultimately worth it. (We paid the subscriptions for about six months.)  I should warn that it all took rather longer than we anticipated. There is something of a learning curve you need to get past. And we made mistakes. We spent days unravelling the family of one Welsh ancestor who proved not to be an ancestor after all. Never mind. We did uncover a host of stories. Like Sue’s great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1801, who died of exhaustion on Christmas Eve 1869 walking with a heavy bag of Christmas provisions from Whitchurch in Shropshire to Handbridge in Chester, intending to stay with his son – a journey of around 30 miles. He collapsed and died less than a mile from The Old Red Lion in Handbridge – the pub where his son was the landlord. The pub is still there. Or the black sheep of Sue’s family who drifted from job to job in the 1800s, and was fined £10 for assault in 1882 after throwing a cup of tea over his wife. It is endlessly fascinating. We discovered the marriage bans of ancestors who signed the register with a cross. Neither of them could read.

Sue was a Newnes and her mother was a Sargeant. We compiled all the stories we uncovered into a book (for family only of course). After this I had to do my tree too. More fascinating stories, and another book. My dad’s family were cockneys, living in the borough of Bow in the East End of London for five generations. They worked on the railways. I never knew. One of my ancestors, Robert Ironmonger, was indicted for ‘certain petty larcenies’ and transported to his majesties colonies in America in 1774, leaving his wife and baby son (my ancestor) in London. In 1776 the pesky colonists only went and started a revolutionary war and Robert was conscripted to fight for the British. Fascinating! I traced my father’s family line back to a gentleman fittingly called ‘End Ironmonger,’ who appears to have been born sometime around 1400 AD. Or thereabouts. And that’s as far as it goes.

So here I am with some new advice. Check out ancestry.com (they’re not paying me a commission). And have a root through your family stories. You might be surprised what you find.

And by the way ... if you happen to be an Ironmonger or a Newnes or a Sargeant or a Wilson, or if you think you might be related in any way ... drop your email address into the comment field and I'll send you the pdf of the book.

 *Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think - Scientific American

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com