Tag Archives: Jackson

by

A Jackson sesquicentennial . . .

Tom Jackson in his 20s

17 December 1872. My grandfather, Thomas Jackson (after whom I get my middle name), was born on this day 150 years ago, at 11 Duke Street, Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, the second son and child of William Jackson, a brewer’s laborer (1839-1888) and his wife Harriet née Bailey (1842-1884).

He had an older brother George (1870-1950) and a younger sister Annie (1877-1913).

11 Duke St, Burton upon Trent today.

He was the 4th great-grandson of John Jackson (my 6th great-grandfather), who was born around 1711 towards the end of the reign of Queen Anne¹.

When I was born in November 1948, Grandad was already an old man, approaching his 76th birthday, older by two years than I am today.

With extended Jackson family in 1949. I’m the babe-in-arms on my mother Lilian’s knee! My eldest brother Martin is sitting on the ground in front of Mum and me, elder brother Edgar is next to Grandad, and my sister Margaret is sitting next to Grandma. My father Fred is standing at the rear, on the right, next to his brother-in-law, Cyril Moore.

My grandparents lived in Hollington (a small village between Ashbourne and Derby) at Ebenezer Cottage, the venue for many family get-togethers.

Ebenezer Cottage, probably in the summer of 1939, maybe 1940.

The photos below, of a picnic in Hollington with Grandma and our Paxton cousins (who lived across the road from my grandparents) was taken in the early 1950s. Visits to Hollington weren’t frequent. My dad didn’t have his own car, just occasional recreational access to the Morris pickup he used as staff photographer for The Congleton Chronicle newspaper. In any case, I was very young so don’t remember too well.

After we moved to Leek (12 miles closer to Hollington) in 1956, Dad set up his own photography business, and bought a secondhand car (often quite unreliable). But it did mean that we could visit our grandparents more often and meet other members of our wider Jackson family. And, from time-to-time, we stayed overnight with my grandparents. I loved sleeping in the bedroom under the eaves.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

On 4 September 1897, Tom (then aged 24) married his first wife Maria Bishop (aged 23) in Burton upon Trent. They had two children: Alice, born on 28 September 1899, and a son, William, born on 15 November 1902. Sadly, Maria died in childbirth, leaving Tom a widower, aged 29, with a three-year old daughter and a baby to look after. His mother-in-law, Emma, was living with the family at that time.

Two years later, on 23 August 1904 he married for a second time, to Alice Maud Bull (my grandmother) at Longford, just south of Hollington where Alice was born in April 1880.

Tom and Alice had four children: Winifred Annie (always known as ‘Wynne’, 1905-2004), Frederick Harry (known as ‘Fred’, my father, 1908-1980), Edgar Albert (1914-1997), and Rebecca Isabel (known as ‘Becky’, 1916-2013).

L to R: Grandad, Alice, Frederick, Winifred, William, Edgar, and Grandma – in about 1915.

Before 1908, the family had moved to 31 South Oak Street in Burton, and remained there until March 1939 when they purchased Ebenezer Cottage in Hollington.

31 South Oak Street today.

In August 1954, Grandad and Grandma celebrated their Golden Wedding anniversary with family and friends in the village hall.

Tom and Alice Jackson with all their children and grandchildren, with the exception of the youngest (Angela) who wasn’t born then. Grandad is holding cousin Timothy, and Grandma holds his sister Caroline, youngest children of Edgar. I’m sitting on the ground at left.

In 1963, they sold Ebenezer Cottage and moved to live with their elder daughter Wynne and husband Cyril in Woodville, Derbyshire. It was there in August 1964 that they celebrated their Diamond Wedding anniversary.

Tom and Alice with some of their children and grandchildren on their Diamond Wedding.

Grandad died on 26 February 1967, aged 94. Grandma, a widow at 86, survived Tom for another 20 months, passing away on 7 November 1968 after suffering a cerebral thrombosis.

I don’t know too much about my grandad’s early life. He was profoundly deaf for many years, but I don’t when that first affected him. I always believed he went deaf as a young man, but we have a photograph of him as a member of the Christ Church Band (a parish in Burton which encompassed Duke Street) in 1898 so presumably was not deaf then.

Tom Jackson is second from the left, front row, holding a flute.

He began his working life as a brewer’s laborer (certainly by 1891) at one of the breweries in Burton, Worthington & Co., and stayed with them throughout his working life.

A stationary steam engine

When he married Maria Bishop in 1897, he was a ‘fireman’, presumably the person who stoked the boiler to power a stationary steam engine (similar, it’s safe to assume, to the one illustrated here) the source of power for the brewery. In the 1901 census, Tom was listed as a ‘stationary engine driver’ and he continued in that occupation until he retired in 1931, aged 59.

I can only surmise that his deafness came about as a workplace-acquired disability, having been exposed daily to the noise of the steam engine and other machinery. No Health & Safety back in the day, and no obligation presumably or workplace support to wear ear protectors.

He didn’t serve in the First World War. At the beginning of the war he was already 41, and probably deaf by then, exempting him from active service.

During the Second World War, Mum spent two periods with Grandad and Grandma in Hollington while Dad was away serving in the Royal Navy. With her were my eldest brother Martin (born just three days before the declaration of war in September 1939) and sister Margaret (born in January 1941).

This was taken in July 1943.
Margaret (in the middle), Martin on the right, and cousin Marian Paxton left.
This might have been taken in 1944 or 1945 when my Dad was back from the war and before being demobbed.

I still have a vivid image of Grandad sitting in his armchair in one corner of the parlor, often with a cigarette dangling from his lips while he dozed. My cousin Jean Gould née Paxton (daughter of his eldest daughter Alice) captured him like that in this painting.

Also, hanging from the key on his desk, are the headphones he used to listen to the radio. And to his left side the grate that my grandmother cooked on. There was no electricity nor running water in Ebenezer Cottage. Water was drawn from a well in the front garden of the house next door – Rose Cottage where Grandma was born.

Rose Cottage, Hollington with the more recent extension to Ebenezer Cottage in the left background.

There was a cinder toilet down a short path outside the back door. And while both water and electricity were eventually installed before they moved to Woodville, the sanitary arrangements remained the same.

When Grandad was dozing in his armchair, we were always warned not to disturb him, not even knock his chair. If we did, he’d wake up, not in the best of moods.

There’s an anecdote, from November 1944, when Grandad was woken from his slumbers. I’m not sure if Martin told me this, or it was Mum. Anyway, on that particular day—the 27th—Grandad was apparently jolted awake and immediately thought the children were playing around his chair. Not so!

Just after 11 am, and 8 miles south from Ebenezer Cottage as the crow flies, an underground ammunition storage depot at RAF Fauld exploded, with between 3900 and 4400 tons of high explosives going up. This was one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history and the largest in the UK. Grandad had been woken by the blast and shock wave from that explosion.

Grandad was a keen gardener, proud of his roses, vegetables, and fruits (particularly gooseberries, raspberries, and blackcurrants).

On the front of the cottage there was a climbing Peace rose to the left of the front door, and a Victoria plum on the right (facing the building). It was always a contest, around August, as to who would get to the delicious plums first: us or the voracious wasps? At one end of the cottage, there was a beautifully-scented lilac tree. In January/February the garden either side of the front steps was covered in snowdrops.

At the bottom of the garden were a couple of damson trees. In the photos below, it looks like Grandad and my Dad are pruning these trees, with a little ‘help’ from Edgar and me. In his memoir Gathering No Moss (completed just before he died in 1980) my Dad tells of being docked a week’s leave while in the Royal Navy for overstaying his leave in Hollington by two days to help with the ‘damson harvest’. This was during the period in 1945 after the end of the war while he waiting to be demobbed.

In the summer I often enjoyed sitting on the steps outside the front door in the late afternoon, anticipating the herd of cows being driven to Hammersley’s farmyard next door for milking.

With my elder brother Edgar and cousin Diana (daughter of Wynne and Cyril) with Grandma and Grandad, late 1950s. Mum and Dad are in the lower photo.

Grandparents, Hollington, and Ebenezer Cottage feature heavily in my childhood memories. Remarkable to think that today we celebrate Grandad’s birthday, 150 years on.

¹ I am grateful to my elder brother Martin for much of the information I have used in this blog post. After the death of our father in 1980, Martin began to research our family’s ancestry, and on some lines has been able to find direct links to the late 15th century. He has compiled the enormous amount of data in this fascinating website: http://www.clanjackson.co.uk/genealogy/

by

On yer bike . . . !

1886 Rover safety bicycle at the British Motor Museum.

It was the late Professor John Jinks (former head of the Department of Genetics at The University of Birmingham), if memory serves me right, who used to say that the invention of the bicycle, and its wider availability in the last quarter of the 19th century, did more for the genetic health of human communities than almost any other.

Variety is, so they say, the spice of life. And when it comes to genetics, it’s variety (specifically genetic variation) that keeps populations healthy. Too much inbreeding is not a good thing. Just look what happened to the Habsburgs.

So what’s the link between the bicycle and human genetics?

For millennia, human societies comprised isolated rural communities, with limited contact between them. Members of these communities tended to marry among themselves. I think it’s fair to assume there was some degree of inbreeding, only overcome by marriage with members of unrelated (or less related) communities.

But as the Industrial Revolution progressed and agriculture was increasingly mechanized, there were significant demographic changes as people moved into urban areas. By the end of the 19th century more people in England and Wales were living in towns and cities than in rural areas.

Having access to a bicycle, whether one lived in a rural village, a small market town, or a city, meant that a young man could court his sweetheart miles away. No more shank’s pony. More and more couples married who did not live in the same immediate community, and these communities became genetically more diverse. At least that’s the idea, in a nutshell, behind Jinks’s idea.

So I decided to look into the various geographical connections of my family.

Since 1980, my eldest brother Martin has developed a fascinating and comprehensive genealogy web site (just click on the image below) to record our family history. And I’ve delved into that database for this particular post.

While the ancestry on my father’s side of the family can be traced back five centuries, Martin has uncovered information to the beginning of the 19th century only on my mother’s. Her parents were Irish and came over to England at the turn of the 20th century.

However, let’s look at my mother’s side of the family first in a little more detail.

My mum, Lilian (actually Lily) Healy, was born in Shadwell, in the East End of London in April 1908, the second child (and second daughter) of Martin Healy and Ellen Lenane. Mum had five sisters and two brothers.

Mum married Dad, Frederick Jackson, in November 1936.

Wedding on 28 November 1936 in Epsom, Surrey. L-R: Grandma Alice, Grandad Tom, Rebecca (Dad’s sister), Ernest J. Bettley (best man), Dad, Mum, Eileen (Mum’s sister), Grandad Martin, Grandma Ellen.

The Healy and Lenane families (both Catholic) came from Co. Kilkenny and Co. Waterford respectively, some 75-80 miles apart. While the birth and baptism information going back five generations (to my 2nd great grandparents) is not as complete as desirable, there’s every reason to believe that marriages took place between families that lived close to one another.

But my grandparents, Martin and Ellen, did not meet in Ireland.

Born in 1876, Grandad Martin was the seventh of nine children, from Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny. After serving in the Royal Irish Regiment of the British army (Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland at that time) in India (on the Northwest Frontier) and South Africa during the Boer War, he became a police constable in the East End of London. He met Ellen in London and they were married in Wimbledon in January 1905.

Grandma Ellen, born in 1878, near Youghal on the southern coast of Ireland in Co. Waterford, was the second eldest of 13 children, although we don’t know how many survived childhood. I also discovered, to my surprise (although thinking about it, I’m not sure why I should be surprised), that she was an Irish speaker.

Both families came through the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. But at what cost?

My mother once told me that some of her parents’ siblings emigrated to the USA. Others took up arms following the 1916 Easter Rising, and perhaps also during the Irish Civil War, on the Republican side. How much of this is true I have no way of confirming. But it adds another interesting dimension to the Healy-Lenane story.

Now let me turn to my father’s family.

My father, Fred Jackson, is from Staffordshire-Derbyshire stock. He was born in Burton on Trent in 1908. Grandad Tom (born in 1872 in Burton) was profoundly deaf since a young age, and never served in the armed forces. Grandma Alice (born 1880), was Tom’s second wife. Not only raising four children of her own (Winifred, Fred, Edgar, and Rebecca), she was stepmother to Alice and Bill.

Tom and Alice celebrated their Golden Wedding with family and friends in Hollington in 1954, and their Diamond Wedding in 1964 at the home of Wynne (their elder daughter and my dad’s elder sister) where they had moved after leaving their home of decades in Hollington.

Golden Wedding celebration in August 1954. Sitting, left to right: Fred, Wynne, Grandad Tom (with cousin Timothy on his knee), Grandma Alice (holding cousin Caroline, I believe), Bill, and Alice. Their other daughter, Rebecca, is standing on the back row, fifth from the left. I’m sitting on the grass, front left.

Diamond Wedding in August 1964.

Our ancestry can be traced through Grandma Alice Bull as far back as the late 15th century. I’m the 13th great-grandson of someone named Bull, whose son Thomas was born around 1505 in Ellastone on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border. As shown on the map below (just zoom in for more details) many of my Bull ancestors (shown in red) came from Ellastone, Cubley, and Hollington (a five mile radius from Cubley) and, in the main, married spouses from the same village or one nearby. But there are a few examples where spouses came from much further away, and it would be interesting to know how the various individuals came to meet in the first place, never mind marrying.

The geographical origins of the Jacksons (shown in blue) are a little more widespread, although coming from southeast Derbyshire in the main. Grandad Jackson lived and worked in Burton, and after the death of his first wife Maria Bishop, I’m not sure how he came to know Alice (who was living in Hollington, about 12 miles on foot), marrying her two years after he became a widower.

Several generations of my forebears were agricultural laborers, some were coal merchants (maybe with a horse and cart for traveling around). Nothing particularly noteworthy.

We are fortunate (thanks to Martin’s impressive research – and others who are also researching many of the same family branches) to have such a fine record for our ancestry. Each time I look through the database I think about the life and times of these forebears of mine. What sort of lives did they really lead? How were they impacted by national events like the Civil War of the 1640s, or the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, for example. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie marched his men right through the area where the Bull family lived, before reaching Derby. Or even international events such as the Napoleonic Wars, the Battle of Waterloo for example, or the Crimean War of the 1850s.

Just plotting their birthplaces on a map (it’s the geographer in me) gives me a sense of belonging. At heart, I am a Staffordshire man.

by

Clickety click!

66Clickety click? You play bingo, don’t you? It’s the 66 ball.

And yesterday was my 66th birthday. Another milestone. It has been a busy year, what with the 4th International Rice Congress in Bangkok three weeks ago (and the months of planning that went into that event).

But yesterday, I could indulge myself for a while. Our weather has been appalling recently – windy and wet, and getting colder. But yesterday dawned bright and sunny, so I took myself out for a 5 mile walk along the Worcester & Birmingham Canal. There were a couple of boats coming down the Tardebigge Flight (that’s 30 locks), and I got chatting with one of the boat owners. Seems they were traveling in tandem – two sisters and their husbands – since June! All over the country, and were now heading for winter quarters at Droitwich, just a few miles down the canal, for the next four months. They are live-aboard boat owners.

Then a little further up the towpath I stopped to chat with a surveyor from the Canal & River Trust who was checking out the brick and stonework in some of the locks. I discovered that this canal will celebrate its bicentenary next year. And thinking about that is really quite remarkable. Here was this canal being dug – by hand – over a period of 20 or more years, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars!

Anyway, it was a wonderful walk along the towpath, as usual.

And then in the evening, Steph cooked my favorite meal: steak and kidney pie, with a puff pastry crust (accompanied by potatoes, carrots and sprouts). Delicious! And, of course, the ‘mandatory’ bottle of wine, in this case a Rosemount Diamond Collection 2013 Shiraz – the perfect accompaniment to this delicious meal.

What a perfect – and peaceful – day.

by

Earth, wind, fire and water . . . Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks

Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming were the planned destinations of our road trip last June across the Great Plains, although it didn’t quite work out that way. Including travel time through the parks, we originally planned to have three days exploring the various corners. In the end we stayed for just two. But this change to our itinerary was well worth it, as I explain in another post.

We entered Yellowstone through the northeast entrance, and had planned to depart through the north gate.

Northeast entrance to Yellowstone

Northeast entrance to Yellowstone

We also stayed at hotels well outside the parks – in Red Lodge (Montana), and Jackson and Cody (in Wyoming). Our scheduled third day in Yellowstone would have meant a long drive back west from Cody (about 70 miles) and then we faced a long journey north to get to our overnight stop in Billings from where we would fly back to St Paul. But there were major roadworks on this north exit road from Yellowstone and considerable traffic delays forecast. So we decided that rather than return to Yellowstone from Cody, we would head east and see what that landscape had to offer. But more of that another time.

As I have blogged elsewhere, Yellowstone was a little bit of a disappointment. Don’t get me wrong – the landscapes are truly magnificent, and the geothermal attractions all that I expected them to be. But there are quite long stretches of road that are almost completely closed in by forest on either side, and there’s not a lot to see. Fortunately we visited in early June so the tourist load was not that significant. I hate to think what Yellowstone must be like at the height of the summer. Nose-to-nose car bumpers I expect. And even in June we encountered several traffic jams as visitors hurriedly pulled off the road, whatever the prevailing condition, to catch a glimpse of a lonely elk or bison.

And the wildlife – or should I say the lack of it – was the other disappointment. I suppose my expectations had been raised through the many TV programs about Yellowstone that I watched over the years. Wall-wall wildlife? It was never going to happen. We did see a few small concentrations of bison (herds would be too strong a description) and a few elk dotted along the horizon. But that was it. although we frequently saw evidence that the wildlife was about and they visited the various geyser sites.

Nevertheless, we did enjoy our visit, and you can’t help yourself if the panoramas do sometimes take your breath away.

On our first day, we traveled through Yellowstone and Grand Teton from Red Lodge, MT to Jackson, WY following (for the first sector before we entered Yellowstone) the spectacular Beartooth Highway. We were fortunate that the road between Tower Falls and Canyon Village, just 19 miles, was already been open for the season, instead of a 51 mile journey via Mammoth and Norris. Click on the map below for an interactive version on the National Parks Service website.

And then we skirted west shore of Yellowstone Lake on our way south into Grand Teton National Park, and on to our accommodation in Jackson, WY.

The following day, we headed north along the west bank of Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park and the base of the Teton Range, heading back into Yellowstone, where we took the west loop road from West Thumb to explore the Geyser Basin including the mandatory stop to watch Old Faithful put on ‘her’ display. On the way to Old Faithful we crossed the Continental Divide at least a couple of times, then headed north through Madison, on to Norris, back to Canyon Village and the east entrance skirting the north shore of Yellowstone Lake. What’s special about the Tetons is that they just rise out of the plain to more than 6,000 feet above (12,000 feet above sea level). It’s just like a wall of mountains aligned north-south. No wonder the Rockies were such an obstacle to cross for the early pioneers.

There’s so much out there on the Internet to read about both national parks that I’m not going to attempt to emulate or surpass those sources. Let me however, provide a small pictorial guide to our visit below.

Scenes in the north of Yellowstone from the northeast entrance

The Yellowstone River canyon

 Sulphur Caldron

Yellowstone Lake

Old Faithful

 Colors of the Geyser Basin

Hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, WY
Land of fire and brimstone

 Landscapes of the northwest

Grand Teton National Park

The Grand Teton range

And finally, we left Yellowstone heading for Cody by crossing the Absaroka Range once again.

We also don’t regret our decision to find hotels outside Yellowstone. Within there park there is limited – and expensive – accommodation. Taking hotels in Red Lodge, Jackson and Cody ensured that we really did see as much of both parks in a limited time.

by

Where do I come from?

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

In 1492, my 12th great grandfather Thomas Bull (on my paternal grandmother’s side) was a lad of about 12. At least we think that the burial record for ‘Thomas Bull’ at Ellastone in Staffordshire is the father of John, William and Thomas Bull in the same parish. If so, he’s my earliest known ancestor, going back 14 generations, when I would have had 16,384 direct ancestors. Half of these are ‘English’ and the other half ‘Irish’ from my mother’s side of the family.

The population of England around 1480 was probably less than 3 million (having gone through the demographic squeeze of the Black Death a century earlier). Just do the maths. We’re all related to each other more than we imagine. We can’t all have ‘independent’ ancestors; there must be a few drops of royal blue blood in all of us. Now my father’s side of the family resided in what once had been the Kingdom of Mercia, specifically in what we know now as north Staffordshire and southwest Derbyshire.

In 1483, Edward IV died and the crown was usurped by his youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who became the notorious (if we are to believe Tudor propaganda) Richard III. Richard was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485 – a site just 40 miles or so southeast from Ellastone. Henry VII became king and the Tudor dynasty was founded. I wonder what the Bull family were up to, and how did the final battle of the Wars of the Roses affect them – if at all?

But we are on firmer ground with Thomas Bull’s ‘son’, John Bull (my 11th great grandfather), born in 1525 in Ellastone, the youngest of three brothers. By the time his son, another Thomas was born in 1552, Henry VIII had come and gone, and his son, the short-lived Edward VI was king, and England was in the grip of a Protestant regime.

When my 8th great grandfather Robert was born in 1613, James I of England and VI of Scotland had been king for 10 years. In 1613, James’s daughter Elizabeth married Frederick V, Elector Palatine through whom the monarchs of the House of Hanover descended, including our present Queen. But when his son Robert was born in 1653, Charles I had already lost his head four years earlier, the three Civil Wars between 1642 and 1651 were over, and Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector.

Sixth great grandfather William Bull, born in 1712 and 6th great grandfather John Jackson (born 1711) were my first ancestors to be citizens of Great Britain following the Act of Union in 1707 uniting the Kingdoms of England and Scotland (which just might be rendered asunder in 2014 if the Scottish Nationalist Party has its way in the independence referendum). Dr John Arbuthnot created the character of John Bull in 1712 as the national personification of Great Britain, especially England. Abraham Darby had already developed his blast furnace in Coalbrookdale, and Thomas Newcommen was about to launch his atmospheric steam engine (about which I recently wrote).

Both my 3rd great grandfathers John Bull and John Jackson were born in 1793. After the excesses of the French Revolution, Great Britain was at war – again – with France; George Washington began his second term as POTUS.

My great grandfather John Bull was born in 1855, when the siege of Sevastopol ended, and the Crimean War ending a few months later. My Jackson great grandfather William was born sixteen years earlier in 1839, the same year that Louis Daguerre received a patent for his camera.

I knew both my paternal grandparents. Grandmother Alice Bull was born in 1880 and died in 1968. She was the second wife of my grandfather Thomas Jackson, who was born in 1872 and died in 1967.

My paternal grandparents, Thomas and Alice Jackson

Thomas had two children by his first wife Maria Bishop, and four with Alice – including my father, Frederick (born 1908, died 1980).

Thomas and Alice Jackson celebrate their Golden Wedding anniversary in 1954 at Hollington, Derbyshire with their children and grandchildren. I’m sitting on the left, aged 5.

My father married Lilian Healy in 1936, and I’m the youngest of three brothers and one sister.

Fred Jackson
Lilian Jackson nee Healy
Taken in Congleton in about 1952 or so. L to R: Mike, Martin, Margaret and Edgar
54 years later!

During the documented 500 years of this family history there were remarkable changes in society, by the way we were governed (from absolute monarchy to a constitutional one under a parliamentary system), by the change from a predominantly agricultural economy to an industrial one. From a small nation on the fringes of Europe to a world-wide empire (and back again). From the records seen, my ancestors were farmers, laborers and the like. Nothing grand. But they’re my ancestors, and because I can name them going back so many generations, it really does make a tangible link with the events through which they lived.

In another post I talked about my Irish ancestry – that’s a story that will take a long, long time and concerted effort to unravel.

My maternal grandparents, Martin and Ellen Healy

So how did I track down all these dates? I didn’t. It’s all the work of my eldest brother Martin who, in 1980 following the death of my father, began to research our family history which is documented on the fabulous ClanJackson website. The site contains information about the paternal genealogy of the Jackson, Bull, Tipper and Holloway families (and some from my maternal grandparents’ sides of the family).

by

It’s all in the genes . . .

It was 1969, maybe early 1970.

I was just leaving the university library at Southampton where I was studying botany and geography. I should add that this was one of my too infrequent visits to the library.

As I headed for the main entrance, I was approached by two teenage girls, one of whom had long, dark, straight hair. They ‘invited’ me to purchase a raffle ticket – I think it was something to do with one of the charity events that students tend to organize each year, and these two girls were at one of the education colleges in Southampton. So I bought a couple of tickets, and then did something rather out of character.

Turning to the girl with long hair, I asked: ‘Is your name Jackson?’

Well, the look on her face made me think I was right.

‘Yes’, she replied, still looking rather surprised.

‘In that case’, I answered, ‘I think you are my cousin Caroline’.

And she was. As soon as I saw her, something inside told me she was ‘family’.

Now I should point out that I had last met Caroline maybe a decade earlier – she would have been five or six, and me about eleven. In some ways it was not such a total surprise, since her father (my dad’s younger brother Edgar) and his family lived in one of the small towns in the New Forest, to the west of Southampton. But I hadn’t made contact with them since arriving in Southampton two or more years earlier, although I had seen Uncle Edgar and his wife Marjorie at the funerals of my grandparents in 1967 and 1968.

Now this memory came to the fore just the other day for a couple of reasons. I’ve been doing some web searches for friends from my university days, so all-things-Southampton were on my mind. Secondly, my youngest grandchild Zoë was born (in the USA) at the beginning of May, and I’d been thinking that she was the youngest of a long line of Jacksons and Healys (Healy being my mother’s maiden name), and wondering what she will make of her antecedents. In just a few generations (my great-great-great grandfather) we’re back to the time of the French Revolution. I also heard in June (via my brother Martin) that my mother’s younger brother Pat had recently died at the ripe old age of 97 – he was the last surviving of eight siblings. Martin had heard about Uncle Pat’s death through his son, Pat – a cousin I did not know I had.

After my dad died in 1980, Martin began a major project to research the family genealogy, which is available online. On the Jackson side of the family he’s been able to trace back to about 1711, and on the Bull side (my paternal grandmother’s side of the family), there’s information stretching back about 12 or 13 generations to around 1480! Other lines – the Tippers and Holloways – can be traced back to 1610 and 1600 respectively.

Martin is going to have a more challenging time of it on the Healy-Lenane side of the family, who hailed from Ireland, Co. Kilkenny and Co. Waterford.

I have now made Facebook contact with cousin Pat, who lives in the Forest of Dean, about 60 miles south of Bromsgrove where I live. And through Facebook, I was contacted by two cousins, Karen and Patsy – daughters of one of my mother’s younger sister Bridie who emigrated to Canada in the 1940s – who live in Indiana, USA and Ontario, Canada, respectively.

There’s only one of my father’s siblings alive – my Aunty Becky, 96, who lives near Newcastle Upon Tyne, and who I’ve visited a couple of times recently since we have been travelling to there to visit our younger daughter Philippa and her family.

But to get back to the genes. As I look at the photos of my parents and grandparents, I can see very clear resemblances of my daughters to one side of the family or the other. Hannah favours, I think, the Jackson side. Philippa is a strong Healy!

I haven’t mentioned anything about Steph’s side of the family: Tribble / Legg. Steph’s parents came from small families. Her father had just one sister, and I believe her mother was a single child, so there’s not the raft of aunts and uncles and cousins on her side of the family as on the Jackson-Healy side. But both Tribble (a West Country name) and Legg are not that common, so I guess if someone with the time and inclination were to look into this side of the family, some quite rapid progress could be made.