Common Ancestor Tales

I have spent some of this last week drawing out family tree’s by hand. I have really enjoyed it. There is something of an art to planning out how to put a tree onto a piece of paper. If you do it carefully it can really tell a story about where your family lived or what they did . It also made me think about family lines.

One thing I find strange about family history is how many people only research their own surname. I guess on the whole it is the history they probably know most about. And there is a pride attached to your own surname as it is in a real sense “yours”. But you miss so much by just researching your surname.

And often it misses out the story of the women in your family and I would not want to perpetuate that. So I guess I am quite zealous about plotting out every line in my family tree! At present I am just looking at going from my great grandparents generation back to their great grandparent as that is far enough back that it is not too personal and yet within DNA range so I can back up my paper research with science. In fact for the moment on this website I am just focusing on my maternal side – mainly because they are the ones we have least records about. Partly because many of them had less wealth but also because they travelled a great deal so the records are hard to find.

One part of my maternal family were in Egypt and until I started researching I think all my close family assumed this was just my grandmother and her parents. But in fact the link to Egypt goes much further back. Drawing out the tree’s for my great grandmother and all her cousins has been really interesting. I am planning to a timline plotting the wider family to try and see who was there at the same time. I think certainly my great grandmother grew up with cousins living close by in Egypt something we never really knew!

Another part of the family that I have been drawing tree’s for were in Sri Lanka. The first of my ancestors went there the 1830’s and we had family presence there until my lifetime. One branch of the family married into the Dutch Burghers (all 5 children) they were a group who had become integrated into Sri Lankan society (unlike the British who never did). This group descended in part from and Irish Sea Captain with one arm – John Doyle Bagenall and his wife Florentina from the Basque country in Spain. I have been doing DNA analysis and have found lots of matches from this couple. I don’t have an Basque ethnicity in my DNA (just the way the dice fell) but a large percentage of these cousins of mine do have 1-2%. I even found one older gentleman with 4% Basque ancestry. It is the first time the ethnicity results in DNA have felt of any value! I have yet to get a match back to that level although they are well within the range where it would be possible. Sadly very few people to date have tested in Spain as it was illegal until quite recently.

One of the things I notice today when I was drawing out maps was a number of twins. We had a natural twin birth amongst my first cousins and I knew my great grandfather was a twin. So I had assumed it was a Templer thing. Today I noticed that there are actually two sets of twins in his sibling – born consecutively! That must have been quite a thing.

And then I noticed that my great grandfathers mother Fanny Mary Dawson also had siblings who were twins. And one of her brothers also had twins. So now I know it was not actually a “Templer” gene but more likely a “Dawson” gene. I will keep an eye out as I go take the tree’s up to the next generation to see if I can trace it further!

Lastly drawing out tree’s is a really good way of fact checking your research. I have been trying to put birth, death and marriage dates on the tree’s. As I was checking on family today I discovered that I had missed a spouse (always a danger when there are two marriage). And I had missed two step brothers to my great great grandmother Fanny Mary Dawson.

It actually changes the story of a family quite a bit if their are two extra big brothers around I think! I love having a tree that covers not just uncles and aunts but also cousins. In order to do DNA I have had to track downwards on lots of lines to find where matches are so I have the info on my tree in ancestry. But I also think knowing the “shape” of the family in terms of size and number of cousins and where your family member sat in that family really makes a difference to be able to visualise their lives.

Still thinking about Fanny Mary Dawson brought up in LLanely in Wales and in the South of England – I always wondered how she met her husband who was born and bred in Sri Lanka. They married in 1875. But today I realised she had two brothers who both married in Sri Lanka. One a few years before her (Augustine in 1873) and one a year or so afterwards (Sydney in 1878 – one of the twins above).

I can’t find a record for where she got married but now knowing these two siblings were married in Sri Lanka and also knowing how few records there are there of such marriages I assume she married out there. And perhaps she came out for a visit to see her brothers? Neither of her brothers stayed in Sri Lanka but I did find today that one of Augustine’s son’s who was born there did return there and was married there himself. In fact her siblings and their offspring travelled far and wide to India, Australia and the USA – and her parents met and married in New Zealand. So they were a family that did travel.

I think drawing out all these tree’s just gives me the space to reflect on these families in slightly different ways and see things I just had not seen before. So all it all it felt like a very good exercise!

There endeth my musing on the practice of hand-drawing tree’s – hope to get them onto the website tomorrow.