I have just watched the latest episode of Who Do You Think You Are? which featured Kim Catrall’s search for her maternal grandfather who had deserted his family in the late 1930s and was never heard of again. I found it very moving to watch and it also had an element of personal interest for me in that the absent George Baugh turned out to be a bigamist. In some ways his story mirrored what I know of my own grandfather James Henry. What struck me most forcibly watching Kim Cattrall’s family was how raw the pain of their father’s desertion was for her mother and aunts 70 years after he left. Unlike a death it was something that had never been resolved; they had had 70 years of wondering where he went and what happened to him.
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August 13th, 2009 | Tags: bigamists, Henry | Category: General | Comments (3)
I knew a little about the Sheffield Flood of 1864 but until the Sheffield Flood Claims Archive was published online a few years ago I had no idea that any of my ancestors had been affected. When the site came online I went along and decided to put in the surname “howgate” just to see if anything came up and there it was, the compensation claim submitted by my great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Howgate.
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July 20th, 2009 | Tags: Howgate, Sheffield Flood | Category: Howgate | Comments Off
My great-grandmother, Margaret Ann Stephens, was born in 1890. She was born in an age where, we are told, that marriages lasted until death and illegitimacy was frowned upon. She was the 3rd of 6 children and seems to have been a one-off. From this distance I’m not sure if I’m impressed by the way she did what she wanted or disapproving of how she lived her life and the pain that must have caused to the people around her.
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July 17th, 2009 | Tags: bigamists, Evans, Gear, genealogy, Osborne, Stephens | Category: General | Comments Off
I thought I’d do a post about the images I’ve used in the site header and the people in them.
This is a photo of my paternal grandfather, Eric Howgate. He was born in 1917 in Sheffield. As a child his parents emigrated to Canada, apparently in the hope that his mother’s health would improve. Sadly it didn’t and the family were back in Sheffield when she died in 1935. He was very badly shell-shocked in Norway in 1940 and never really recovered from that.
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July 15th, 2009 | Tags: Garside, Groark, Henderson, Howgate, Howieson, Jones, photos, Stephens | Category: General | Comments Off
After a 6-month break, I’m finally getting around to getting all my genealogical research back online. The site is very much a work-in-progress at the moment however I have uploaded all my data and TNG is installed and working.
July 15th, 2009 | Tags: Site | Category: General | Comments Off
