![]() I felt like a new genealogy project challenge so started unravelling the tree of my old school friend Rachel, a real Norwich and Norfolk lass. I fly back in history with it. I see where other researchers have got stuck and crash through, where they went wrong I make corrections. Such challenges are my idea of fun. So, I pick a person and work out their genealogy, hence Rachel, there in the land of the bishey barney bees, and also I pick another Norwich friend, Leander. The Norfolk and Norwich lassie and the Norfolk and Norwich laddie. Both their families lives seem to be ever so slightly entwining, same places which they lived at, two of their young agricultural labourers, one from each family, even living next door to one another, and two others of their ancestors having had a scrap on the street. In Rachels family there is more than a hint, though nothing clear, of prostitution. Such researches are all consuming and there is little time in life for anything else. I have to force myself to have a break and do other things. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees.
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![]() My American friend, Satshanti, was messaging me what was for us an amazing discovery. A cave being excavated in Israel on Mount Carmel has been found to harbour our matriarchal DNA N1b and is between 11,000 and 13,000 years old, found there in the remains of a 2 or 3 year old boy. N1b, so rare, and yet found. This boy, as Satshanti said, is one of our relatives and this is 'our cave'. Raqefet cave. The boy would be a brother, son, cousin. From this we can deduce that our people were part of the Neolithic Natufian Culture and Israel was their homeland, how wonderful. A few thousand years later my ancestors had moved northwards to Anatolia, as said Satshanti, as an N1b has there been found at that time. I don't even know how the Caucasus fits into this now. Satshanti says the journey up into those mountains would have come later. The mountains would have been a refuge from the tribal annihilations in the lowlands, as usual. I was so very excited as this was news long awaited, to have a sure ancestral connection to a specific place, and even a name given to that culture, and even more amazingly, some detail of lifestyle. The people back then lived in semi-subterranean round houses, wow, that in itself stirred my emotion. They laid on beddings of mint, sage and sedge grasses (this had been discovered in the caves where the bodies had been laid). They hunted gazelles and gathered almonds and pistachios. They made adornments from bone and little sacred statuettes out of limestone, of both human and animal forms. They were the first nomads to settle into established homes, and this was before farming. Mount Carmel is known to have anciently had a high altar and holy groves. It was such a sacred mountain that not everyone was allowed to step upon it. Pythagorus, the hero of my friend Trebha, said it was the most sacred mountain in the world and went there on pilgrimage. Satshanti sent me some pictures of the cave, one with its wide entrance and views, and of the archaeologists who are still present there. Oh, gosh, I want to go and tune into my ancient people. This is 'our cave' Satshanti and I are saying. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. With my oldest son having asked if there is a way to show his girlfriend our family tree, I get back to working on my own new genealogy website. I try to make this beautiful designer style and to write of my ancestors in a creative literary way. Working more on my genealogy passion site, there's plenty to do. A small introduction about the researcher I did, and the beginning of my granny Isabelle Bane's life story, a sad one really, considering that she lost her mind. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() I have buried myself into the research of my daughters friend Rosie's genealogy and am doing well, breaking past walls with good detective work. This I started as the girls sat at the table by me, or rather enriching what I had already begun looking at before. As I looked at it, I asked Rosie what she knew of her family, and the girls were quite amazed, as that very day they had been discussing asking me to look up such things for her. A couple of days later, I messaged Rosie a newspaper clip about one of her ancestors having bred a four legged chicken, this having been enough to get him in the papers. These Mosses on her fathers side were long time traders of Liverpool, and one of the family, an uncle, Alexander Mosses, was a famous portrait artist there. There were sailors in Rosie's family too. One article that I found was of a Davies who married a Mercer, good detective work here. She'd been a widow already when she married, and patiently I tracked down that she was originally a Williams. Her first husband, a Davies, was a sailor who died at sea aged only 28, washed overboard in a gale somewhere between Newfoundland and Lisbon. The supplementation of newspaper research is such an invaluable bonus to genealogy research, bringing all so much more to animation. I am totally fascinated by all such things. Reabsorbing myself in Rosie's genealogy, I found a scoop, as one might say, paying off for all the hard work, a death too early of a Kellett, and what from, but a coal mining tragedy. There in the newspapers, in all it's detail, is the story of him being run over by fast descending corves. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Setting up a new project, my 'genealogy passion' website, my first mission was to document interviews with older family members, though as yet I could only find a few I had done, a good long interview with my Great Aunty Connie, a couple with my granny Isabelle Bane, and just a smithereen of interviewing my nanny Eileen Spencer. Somewhere there is more, unless the fire and flood disasters had got to them. And I began to write about the life of my great grandfather, D'Auvergne Bane, not for the first time but always improving the account, and I have discovered he truly was a cousin of D'Auvergne Barnard who he was named after. D'Auvergne Barnard was the composer of our family. The correction I had to make here was that my D'Auvergne's granny was not a Bird, but an Empson, and it was she who was sister to the composers mother, Charlotte Empson. My fanciful imagination of my D'Auvergne having been a secret love child to an Ango-Indian family, I have to drop really, not that it's impossible, but seeing a dear close family connection now, that really is enough. I found from rummaging in the garage more interviews with members of the family. The only one I hadn't found now was my Shetland grandfather talking of Shetland and Scotland. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Families always for so long named their children after themselves, after grandparents and parents, using maiden names as middle names, and past surnames still being used if they had been from better off times. This was a great surprise to me when I saw this from genealogy. How quickly the past is forgotten, with the choosing of new and individual names being the norm. For me to have named one of my daughters Susan after me, which always was once the way, would now be seen as crazy or egotistical. But this was the natural family honouring, solidarity, a kind of continuation of the ancestors, by which one had their blessings. The first children usually honoured their grandparents, the sons named firstly after the paternal line and the daughters of the maternal, and then the parents themselves were honoured. This was why if one child died, the name was then reused. And, so, thinking in this manner, I did an exercise of renaming my children, my oldest son to be John David Jordan, Eleanor to be Joanna Grace Jordan, Rosina to be Susan Tudor Harrison, and George to be George Inkster Harrison. In such ways one can play with the names. George may even be George Lyall Inkster Harrison. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() In my interest for genealogy I have been brushing up on friends trees, working a lot on Juliets, now far away in Australia, who is descended from the Earlston Scottish gingham manufacturers, and so I dwelled on her and her family. From Juliets to looking more at the tree of her ex, Buddhist Nick. I see that a far back Upton man, maybe or maybe not his ancestor, maybe a relative, James Upton of Leeds, abandoned his family to the workhouse, for which he was being pursued by the authorities. He appears to have got away with it though, finding himself a new family elsewhere. The bigger pastime over the coming days was extending and enriching Buddhist Nick's ancestry project. This is always time consuming. Really, its a natural work for me, as unravelling family stories so fascinates me. Such a work I always do for free and it is a good engagement for my brain. Nick is keen to know more, having passed all on to his mother, who takes great pride in it and has made up a big chart displaying this ancestry. In some ways our families almost entwined, his people also being from the same part of London, marrying in St Martin in the Fields, attending the church of St Andrew by the Wardrobe, both lovely churches which I had recently visited in London. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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