Proving me to be the utter snob that I am

One bleary evening about two years ago I discovered - simply by googling Andrew Vance Speer, as I had done many times before - that he was listed in Burke's Landed Gentry, and my excited eyes ran greedily back over his forefathers to see just how landed his family once had been. As I scanned the pages back, I determined in a whirling and glorious moment that through AVS we were no less than descendants of Robert the Bruce and his two successors.

I wasted no time in telling the Trouserwearer, who has inside him a giant thistle instead of a heart, and also told everyone else too. Why I was so inordinately excited, when all around me greeted my news with polite embarrassment (-or stifling their envy, perhaps, I told myself). No matter: I carried within me the blood of princes royal, so nurrr!

And then I lost the article and its pages which proved my glorious descent. Too regally lazy to upload it to my family tree on GenesReunited, I had copied it to my hard-drive to a place that would prove so obscure that I was never to find it again. Every so often I would google Andrew Vance Speer, but the article in question never emerged again from the internet. From time to time relatives would ask me what had happened to the article, and I was truly beginning to think that I had perhaps dreamed the whole episode.

Then recently, as you know, I decided to take the family tree further than before. RWY (another descendant of the elusive line) and I looked everywhere for a Vance and Speer pedigree line, short of actually buying Burke's and O'Hart's, because they are a couple of hundred quid a shot. At last, RWY found an old edition through the internet, and sent off a query about its entries, to which we received the damning and deflating answer:

Dear Sir, Sorry it has taken so long to reply to your query about your Vance line in the Irish Pedigrees. Vol 2 Pages 14 and 15 are taken up with pedigrees of Vances. The first one is of a branch from Coagh, Co. Tyrone, who are indeed descended from Robert the Bruce. The second line which seems to be your own, lists descendants of Joseph Vans of Wigton, Cumberland. On neither pedigree is the Norman Conquest mentioned. There are numerous mentions of Speers and Vances throughout the book. We are based in Cambridgeshire, at Ramsey, near Huntingdon. Regards, etc-

After our initial disappointment had burned off, and after the Trouserwearer solomnly informed, and we had consigned ourselves to be mere mortals after all, we took comfort in the fact that all the Vances were probably related anyway - Coagh and Dungannon were practically spitting distance apart.

Nevertheless, I resolved to enter what I could get from all sources into the new family tree. And what do you know what this latest research yielded? I found that the mother of Andrew Vance Speer, Jane, had ancestors who came from both Vances, who intermarried (not that perhaps we should talk about that too much): indeed, one Vance lady's parents were both Vances, and she married a Vance herself. And the Vances of her mother's line were the ones who descended from The Bruce, hussah!! And further back, they were the de Vaux of Vallibus who came over with William the Conqueror in the Norman Conquest!!! Hah! We were right. And additionally, 'Wigtown', in Dumfrieshire (no longer Cumberland) was the seat of the 'right' Vances in any case. So, nurrr.

And now I have today transcribed all those generations back to the first Vance, Lord Harold de Vaux of Normandy, born around 1010, and I think my hands are going to fall off. And I could go back further than Robert the Bruce too, to his great-grandparents, but I'm not going to.

I'm happy. Someone play 'Flower of Scotland' for me!

Hello Jenks and Yardley; bye-bye Jinks and Talbot

To my delight, a new certificate arrived in the post today, and although I am engrossed in Vance family research, this was a very exciting development because it not only gives me a new generation of Lunts, and a new surname, but also a correction to part of the tree.

The certificate in question was a copy of the marriage register for the aristocratic-sounding (but illiterate) Charles Lunt and Elizabeth Jenks. They married in St George's parish church, St George Birmingham, in 1851. Neither were literate, it seems, as both have made their mark with an 'x', and so have their witnesses. But now I know that Charles' father was called William (yes, another one to add to the tree...), and the father of Elizabeth was called Joseph, not Thomas as I had previously thought. This means that the sweet lady Anita Jinks who had contacted me through GenesReunited has got her tree wrong when marrying up her Elizabeth Jinks to my Charles Lunt. And the name on this marriage register is most decidedly 'Jenks', not Jinks.

I've got to admit to relief about that (even though Anita was very sweet), because frankly the name 'Jinks' reminded me of the shifty and not very trustworthy character from the Pickwick Papers. It also means that I bid farewell to the name Talbot, for I had copied Sarah Talbot down as the mother of Elizabeth Jenks, and this is now complete tosh.

On the plus side, I have an entire family of Lunts who were previously lost to time, and although they crammed all eight of themselves into a Kathleen Dayus-style back-to-back terrace which no doubt only had three rooms (St Georges is now called Newtown and um, I'm glad I don't have to live there), the nice thing about them is that William, the father, was a 'brass founder'. My goodness, doesn't non-ferrous metal flow through the Lunt veins?

Through the LDS site I now know that William Lunt was born in Feb 1805 and married Eliza Yardley (nice brummie name for you) who was a year older than he was, on 23 June 1823 at St Philip's Birmingham.

I don't know why but I simply can't help it: when I see that a couple married from May to September then I imagine a chaste love match. When I see they've married on dates like 17 February I always suspect that there's a more pressing reason for the wedding...harsh, but true. But 23 June is, after all, a very nice date for a wedding - even if it is in the middle of Birmingham....

It's all gone tree-shaped

I never thought that I would get frustrated by an exploding tree. I've been frustrated by dead-ends before on so many occasions - this really ought to be savoured and enjoyed.

What has happened is that I have followed a line back of my Speer/Dales/Yates line, and for some reason I never looked at this particular line into it before. The Speer and Vance families are wonderful to have because their history has already been largely explored, thanks to O'Hart and his Irish Pedigrees. Additionally, a very very distant cousin of mine (George Speer) in the States is working on something called the Speer Genealogy Project, and he's already done a great deal of research.

So it's just a matter of copying it into my own tree. Only because these two families have some illustrious forbears, the tree is now expanding in the opposite direction because each generation is well-documented in its own right. And my God, it's taking so long to transcribe, going back into medieval times.

Please don't think that I'm knocking having the Earls of Lennox and the Bishop of Orkney in my tree - it's like a dream to find them there. And I am relishing the fact that all these people happen to be of Scottish descent, not least because it will irritate my dear husband who believes himself to be the only real haggis-eater outside Scotland.

Meanwhile, William had to come home from school today, complaining of tummy-ache and feeling sick. I am delighted that he recovered almost upon walking through the front door; however, I made him take bed-rest for the rest of the afternoon, as I had a slight suspicion that he may just be ever so slightly exaggerating his symptoms... which conveniently meant that I could stay on the computer all afternoon, uploading more people into the tree.

In the beginning there was the blog

This journey of mine is demanding a record.

I've been uncovering my family tree now for about three years. I can hardly remember how or why I began; it was something to do with wanting to have something to leave my child William, because I haven't really got anything else of value to give him. My child grows up without the context of a close extended family like the one I had, and I thought: what if something happens - and something will happen one day - to me? How will he know where he's come from? A thousand chances, a thousand happenings unfurl through history and here he is, my tiny baby, and he may one day want to know where he came from. To know where you come from stops you floating. And despite all the accidental happenings, having your tree to hand gives you the sense that it was no accident. All these people, all these families, they coupled and they looked after each other for you, for if they hadn't, you simply wouldn't be here.

In the beginning, I used GenesReunited to build a tree, and it went from there. I wouldn't say that I was utterly diligent, and I have been reprimanded by a far more diligent member of the family for not having absolute and utter proof in my hands before publishing: but it's a dynamic and organic animal, my tree, and it lives and changes: a branch here, a branch there severed and forgotten. Using a mix of FreeBMD, Ancestry.co.uk and the LDS site, I was able to piece together a few generations on both sides. Then I had Benedict and the research had to cease. Now he is nearly three the work has begun again and I can't believe I could have let it go for so long. There is always more to be done, to be explored, up-tree or down. Now I am uploading my tree to a new site at MyFamily, in the hope that other people in my family will want to share in it and contribute.

Last night I was filled with the need to go and see my Great Aunt Kathleen (Nora Kathleen, in fact, as I only recently discovered through undertaking my tree). I have been able, over the last few days, to research her father's side of the family, and I realised that through Kathleen, I am at last able to place some 'flesh on the bones' of some of those people whose names appear in the Lunt/Yates tree. It took me just over two hours to get to Dymock, but the effort was so worth the drive. Kath was fabulous, even though, in her words, her legs are now both 'wonky' - but then, she is 93.

As Kath begins to talk to you the years seem to fall like soft feathers from her face. She looks over towards the fireplace to remember, as if she's studying a cinema screen, as it all comes back to her, spilling and spreading in front of her. It frustrates me that no-one has invented a way of being able to transmit visual memories from one person to another: I can only invent my own inner portrait of the charismatic but sadistic sleeping face of the almost certainly alcoholic Papa (her grandfather Arthur); I can try to imagine the fragrant fairytale garden of Halcyon Lawn, where she grew up. She fills me with sadness too - I had had no concept before of the lives of so many young men and women in my grandparents' era, erased in their beauty by the ever-threatening and commonplace but deadly consumption. And then again, the humour of hearing about people like 'Tomato Arse', an elderly, pious female lodger at Halcyon Lawn who not only stole Kath's rightful tomato one teatime, but stole a vicar from his wife.

The time passed so quickly; I was reluctant to leave, but I had to; and at least my notebook was full of notes. I can't wait to go back and find out more.

Tonight, I have researched her husband's Jack's line (or rather, re-researched, as I did this about three years ago initially and lost my notes). He came from fine old Northamptonshire yeoman stock and a small village, so it was easy to find through the censii and then through the Pedigree Resource File on LDS. I could go back for him some 250 years; but the interesting thing was that for him an entire generation seemed to be missing, for he was born in 1889, and she not until some 25 years later. Therefore Kath's son John, who is now in his early sixties, had a father who was born in Victorian times.

By the time I can remember him, Uncle Jack was in his eighties: a diminutive, yet bulky figure who used to suddenly appear out of nowhere at the farm, and to me, it seemed, he used to block out the sunlight. He used a zimmer-frame to get around and I remember him roar out, "KATH!" when he needed something to be fetched. My terror would gradually subside if we all sat around the kitchen table to eat, for the longer you sat there, the gentler he seemed to become. However, even at a very, very young age I learned not to sit on his chair in the kitchen; he would order you off it with a terrifying bark; but I think now - I think - he was only teasing.