Flying_Monkey
Recyclist
- Location
- Odawa
I was wondering if anyone else has done any ancestry / family research here (or is interested in it).
My father was struggling with doing this, so I decided to get involved over the winter break and discovered all kinds of things that seemed unlikely at first, but which have now turned out to be confirmed by independent sources.
The short version: my dad's side of the family comes from several generations of 'illegitimate' children, or if you like from families that were the second, 'unofficial' family of the man concerned. This means also that we have discovered that our wider family is much bigger than we had thought and we have all kinds of cousins and so on that we never knew about.
This is all because my great-great grandfather and great-grandfather were part of a (quite well-known) traveling theatre / music hall family in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. They were singers, musicians and comedians, mostly but not exclusively blackface minstrels, originally from the edge of Yorkshire and Lancashire (Saddleworth near Oldham), although they all moved to south London eventually, the centre of the music hall universe. Each of them had two families, the first from marrying young, and the second from when several years later, they met a much younger woman who was involved with the theatre, and just left their wives and started new families.
My great-grandfather in particular seems to have very irresponsible - as when his second partner died very young in the early 1920s, he upped and went back to his first family, leaving my grandfather to be raised by his older sisters (the oldest two of whom also seem to have come from a previous marriage that my great-grandmother had - whether she left her husband or he left her or he died, we don't know yet). The two families did actually know each other for some time and even were friendly to some extent, but they fell out and never talked to each other again at some point (perhaps following my great-grandfather's death in the mid-1930s).
Anyway, it's all fascinating (along with all the professional, career stuff I've found), and it's totally blown our family away, and at the same time has explained a lot of resentments, hints, gaps and silences in the stories my grandfather told.
Has anyone else discovered any skeletons in their family closets?
My father was struggling with doing this, so I decided to get involved over the winter break and discovered all kinds of things that seemed unlikely at first, but which have now turned out to be confirmed by independent sources.
The short version: my dad's side of the family comes from several generations of 'illegitimate' children, or if you like from families that were the second, 'unofficial' family of the man concerned. This means also that we have discovered that our wider family is much bigger than we had thought and we have all kinds of cousins and so on that we never knew about.
This is all because my great-great grandfather and great-grandfather were part of a (quite well-known) traveling theatre / music hall family in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. They were singers, musicians and comedians, mostly but not exclusively blackface minstrels, originally from the edge of Yorkshire and Lancashire (Saddleworth near Oldham), although they all moved to south London eventually, the centre of the music hall universe. Each of them had two families, the first from marrying young, and the second from when several years later, they met a much younger woman who was involved with the theatre, and just left their wives and started new families.
My great-grandfather in particular seems to have very irresponsible - as when his second partner died very young in the early 1920s, he upped and went back to his first family, leaving my grandfather to be raised by his older sisters (the oldest two of whom also seem to have come from a previous marriage that my great-grandmother had - whether she left her husband or he left her or he died, we don't know yet). The two families did actually know each other for some time and even were friendly to some extent, but they fell out and never talked to each other again at some point (perhaps following my great-grandfather's death in the mid-1930s).
Anyway, it's all fascinating (along with all the professional, career stuff I've found), and it's totally blown our family away, and at the same time has explained a lot of resentments, hints, gaps and silences in the stories my grandfather told.
Has anyone else discovered any skeletons in their family closets?
