Collecting distant relatives

Last week I was contacted by someone who thought that he and I might share a distant ancestor.

The ancestor in question was certainly distant - his name was Cyprian Shorter and his son Herbert was my great grandmother's grandfather. Cyprian was born in 1803, and was registered in the censes as being a shoe- or bootmaker from a parish called Cheslyn Hay in Staffordshire.

'Cyprian' is an unusual name, and Cheslyn Hay is a small place. Gavin's great grandfather was called Alfred Cyprian Shorter, and through this ancestor he had been able to establish that my Cyprian Shorter was his ggg grandfather too - and that he and I were fourth cousins!

As we found out more about each other, we found some remarkable similarities between us, although Gavin is some ten years younger than I am. Somewhat alarmingly, we discovered that our respective great-great grandfathers - who were brothers - both died in their early thirties. So I have now sent off for the death certificate of Herbert, in the 'hope' that he died through accident rather than illness - in case there is some ghastly hereditary illness that we ought to be aware of... *update* they both died of pneumonia, so thank goodness for that!

We're both completely and passionately mad about history. It emerged that even though he lives in a completely different part of the country, Gavin had (only the previous weekend) driven through the town in which I live on his way to visit the Lunt Roman Fort. As if that was not odd enough, my maiden name is 'Lunt'.

We are both creative people, and we enjoy writing; we both share the same philosophy towards our respective family trees. And we both loathe spiders!! It just felt as if I had known this person for years, so over the past week we have been swapping notes and ideas, and have been discussing ways in which we could develop some of these further.

Two more developments: I have been given a commission to paint an African elephant - of all things - for my brother's London flat. I'm really thrilled he asked me when he could commission anyone he chose - but somewhat nervous at the prospect of painting an elephant. I have never painted an animal before in my life, so this should be a real experience and I thought I might post stage-by-stage photos on the blog so you can see how I'm getting along. Why an elephant? - well, my brother is probably as obsessed with Africa as I am about history (he's just climbed Kilimanjaro), so he wants an elephant. Fair enough!

Finally, I received the registration certificate that I was after in the post below for Jane Chapman, and her mother's maiden name was, in fact, Nutting!

The online surname database Surname DB maintains that this is a 'famous English name', but I have never heard of it before. Notwithstanding, I was delighted that it was an unusual name because it makes it so much easier to trace families of that name: accordingly, with the help of the LDS FamilySearch site I was able to go back even further, and will write about this in a future post.

But by far the best thing about the week was finding someone with whom I can chat about my breakthroughs and frustrations while working on my family tree - and he totally gets it.

The title of this post was created by Gavin. Cheers, cousin!