Chapter 2

Family 1 - Ancestors

300th Birthday Party Invitation

To

Mick and Peg, Harry and Ethel, Dud and Mabel, Hugh and Sophie, Charlotte and James, John and Mary, William and Rebecca, Peter and Elizabeth, Abraham and Maria, Isaac, John and Abraham……..

Pete and Sue would be delighted if you could join them at their home in Downend, Bristol during 2022 for a celebratory drink and the opportunity to reminisce on the events of the last three hundred years of family history.

PS - Children welcome.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic?  A grand family reunion.  Why not just tell the time machine to go back through the generations to gather all the relatives up and bring them here for a day?  Eight generations of memories stretching back to the early eighteenth century.  Stuart and Murray’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandad, Abraham Sheath, was laid to rest in 1783.  A time when Britain was still fighting to hang onto rebellious American colonial states; when ‘Mad’ George III was on the throne; William Pitt had just become our youngest ever Prime Minister aged only 24; the Montgolfier brothers were making the first balloon flight and Wolfgang Mozart was premiering his Symphony No 36.  Abraham and his family would have heard of the recent sensational southern hemisphere discoveries of Captain Cook and the government’s plans to send a fleet of ships to found a new colony in a place called New South Wales, without ever knowing that it would be the place to which some of their descendants would one day emigrate or incredibly visit just for a holiday.  They would have noticed the growing impact of the noisy new-fangled steam-engines, the proliferation of the canal network, and the spread of London, creeping ever closer to their village of Oxshott in Surrey.

That we know anything at all is largely thanks to the research Dad did over the years.  Starting back in the mid-seventies, when his interest was piqued whilst helping Jackie with a school project, he applied his scientific, meticulous, mind to what was to become one of his main hobbies.  Most of what follows has been lifted from his files, notes and biography and placed for safe-keeping in the time machine archives.

Dad’s side

I don’t just carry Abraham’s surname; he’s also bequeathed me 0.8% of my genetic make-up.  In this respect, apart from the family name, he’s of no more importance than the other 127 grandparents of that generation that have contributed the remaining 99.2 %.  All of these other unknown ancestors will have their own stories, both going back further in time and advancing steadily forwards, until one of their descendants makes a first appearance, several generations later, on my family tree.  However it’s the Sheath branch that Dad has pursued furthest back in time and so this is where we’ll start.

I wish we knew who Abraham and his family were, how they made ends meet, what they thought of the gentry, the church, Europe, the colonies.  Were they farmers or trades folk, villagers or townies, foot soldiers or milkmaids, prosperous or poor, devout or dubious, campaigners or conformists?  Was family life happy or difficult, was it tarnished by criminality or celebrated by achievement, blighted by tragedy or blessed by good fortune?

The time machine has done its best but the details are sketchy.  It seems Abraham, his son John, his grandson Isaac, and their families lived in and around Oxshott village in Surrey.  There are a number of inscribed gravestones in the local church of nearby Stoke D’Abernon and a Sheath Lane in the village which might indicate that the family was quite prosperous and well known in the area.  Maybe they should have stayed there; its slap in the middle of the stockbroker belt and I’ve just checked the house prices on Right Move for our old lane.  Most of the homes are going for well over a million.  Clearly we’ve gone downhill as a family over the last two centuries.

It’s another sixty years before it’s possible to get a real fix on either the paternal or the maternal lines.  My great-great-great grandfather, another Abraham (6%), was living eight miles from Oxshott in New Malden, Kingston-on-Thames when he died in 1885, aged just 45.  By this time he’d already been widowed for four years after the death of Maria Cheeseman (6%), his 41 year-old wife of 10 years.  They had six young children so it must have been tough for Abraham but now, following his death, the wider family needed to find homes for the orphaned brothers and sisters.

Three of them, Edward, aged 13, Agnes 11 and Hugh 8, were brought up by their Uncle Isaac and Aunt Harriet who lived in the nearby village of Long Ditton where they ran the grocer’s shop.  Hugh, my great grandfather, (I’ve got 12% of his genes), was still living with them in 1895 when he was 18. 

What would he have been up to during these times, the last few years of Queen Victoria’s reign?  Well we know he didn’t join Kitchener’s Army for their ill-fated campaigns against the Mahdi in Sudan and the prospect of fighting the Dutch Boers a few years later clearly didn’t appeal.  He didn’t run away to sea, finding a berth on one of the thousands of merchant ships ferrying the wealth of the empire back to the warehouses and living rooms of the burgeoning middle-classes.  It’s more likely he helped out with the family grocery business and, with a few pennies in his pocket, I bet he ventured into London to see the opening of the new Tower Bridge or to experience the thrill of a ride on the new underground railway system.  Maybe he and his mates were regulars at the Victoria Inn in Oxshott where his Uncle George was the landlord. 

What we do know is that on the night of the 1901 Census he was recorded as a ‘visitor’ at the home of Duke and Alice Werner in South Norwood, a growing suburb of south London 13 miles from Long Ditton.  And it just so happens that five weeks later he married Duke’s younger sister Susan.

The Werner family name had its origins in Germany.  Their father, Peter Werner was born in 1852 in Pferdsfled, a Rhineland village about 80km SW of Frankfurt (and so I can claim to be 6% German).  We don’t know why he moved to Britain but by 1871 the Census records him living in Lambeth with his brother Phillip and sister Sophia and within another ten years he’s met and married Elizabeth Norris (6%). They clearly enjoyed family life; they had nine children, the youngest being Susan, my great-grandmother, (12%), who was born in 1880.   The family baking business was in Croydon: Peter was a Master Baker and they obviously prospered.  At the turn of the century they could afford to move to a large new house, Beauchamp Lodge in Sutton, and Peter had become a naturalised British citizen.

How did Hugh meet Susan?  Did her family supply bread or cakes to the Sheath Grocery Store?  Did they bump into each other at the local music hall or church?  What we do know is that they’d known each other for at least eight months before the wedding, that it would have been quite a squeeze for Susan to slip into her bride’s dress, and they both gave the same address for the marriage certificate. Number 37 Beulah Road, Thornton Heath was just around the corner from her parents’ home and prompts speculation she might have had to leave her parents’ home when she revealed her pregnancy.  After the birth of their first child, Norman, they had four more children and lived at a variety of homes in the area.  Dudley, my granddad, (12%) was number three, arriving in 1906 at 19, St James Avenue, Sutton.

Unfortunately the marriage was not particularly stable or happy; they were short of money and often argued.  Hugh’s wages as a clerk would not have been high and Susan may not have been able to enjoy the quality of life she enjoyed whilst growing up.  By 1909, Hugh had moved out and the two older boys were living with their Werner grandparents at the Lodge.  However, some sort of reconciliation must have taken place because two other children, Kit and John, arrived in 1912 and 1913 and they were partially re-united as a family (still without the two older boys) and living at 70, North End, Croydon by the time the Great War broke out.  This house is now part of a shopping precinct and currently selling sport fashion shoes under the Foot Locker franchise.

It’s unknown whether Hugh was conscripted or volunteered but he ended up as a sergeant in the Army Pay Corps and, rather than being sent to the Western Front with its associated perils, horrors and hardships, he was given the far less risky posting to the Ordnance Depot at Chilwell, just a few miles to the west of Nottingham.  For some reason, the family also moved to Nottingham, which in the prevailing wartime circumstance seems a rather unusual thing to do; some family hand-me-down stories suggest she was struggling to cope with three young children and insisted on Hugh’s support.  If that was the issue, it was compounded in 1919 when their sixth child, Roland, was born.  Six months later, Hugh was on his way again, this time posted to Mesopotamia (Iraq) where he spent the next four years.  That must have been quite an eye-opener for a boy brought up in a grocer’s family - he would have been travelling via Cairo and across the deserts of the Middle East in the very recent footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia at a time when British policy in the area was stumbling from one bad decision and betrayal to another.  For much of the time, he was based in the north of the country in Mosul, the ethnically diverse, beautiful, ancient city that now finds itself the recent epicentre of the civil war and the notorious base of ISIS.  The family archives include a hundred-year-old, beautifully scripted letter he wrote from here to his eldest son Norman on his 21st birthday; interesting also because this son had effectively been ‘sent away’ to his uncle and aunt 13 years earlier when he was just eight.

Did he push for the posting to ‘escape’ the domestic scene?  I think it’s possible, especially as it seems he didn’t properly live with the family again in Nottingham after his demob’.  Susan and the children struggled on in slum housing in the rundown St Anne’s neighbourhood of the city until eventually things came to a head and her parents intervened when they finally realised that Hugh was unlikely to be of much help. They provided sufficient money to enable her to move to a small house in Pierrepoint Road, just south of the River Trent, in the expanding village of West Bridgford.  Hugh, meanwhile, had found work and lodgings in Cardiff and, whilst not quite deserting his wife and children, remained virtually incommunicado, making only a single rare appearance at a family gathering over the next two decades.  It would be a sudden change in his health that finally, somewhat surprisingly, reunited the family in 1955.  More later.

And what of their children? Remember there were six of them.  The elder two, Norman and Peter, had been ‘farmed out’ to relatives and grown up in south London where they were making lives for themselves.  Norman trained as an accountant, spending much of the thirties working for swanky hotels in London and France; a single guy, there are a number of photographs of him in the company of a chap called Harry.  Whatever the relationship was never became clear but in 1955 he surprisingly married a very educated, determined, single woman, also in her fifties, who I would later come to know as Aunt Madge.  He finished his career in a senior role for Batchelor's Peas and they lived in East Bridgford for a while before they retired to the Lake District in the 1960s. 

Peter, the second son, worked in the newly-evolving radio business, marrying in 1929 Ethel Mason, the daughter of the owner of the small factory where he was employed.  They eventually set up as newsagents in Hayes and had three children, remaining in the neighbourhood where they grew up.

The other four children had accompanied Susan on their journey to Nottingham.  Dudley left school aged 14 and found a variety of jobs during the 1920's.  He was a traveller for a well-known chocolate manufacturer; he spent time as a waiter, and then he became a bus conductor with the private transport company owned by the Barton family.  (Fifty years later, Mum would take us into town from Bramcote Hills on a Barton bus and one hundred years later I can still do the same!).  At some point, late in the decade he met Mabel Gray, my grandma (12%) possibly through mutual contacts their families had in the lace industry.  Both were living in far from salubrious terraced homes but anecdotal stories and a few photos indicate that they made the most of what they had, getting out on the town, or taking Dud’s motorbike for a spin or a camping trip in the nearby countryside.  They married in 1932 and made their home in Rydal Crescent on the Meadows estate, in housing far from the idyllic scene the names conjures up.  Four months later Dad was born!  With hindsight it is clear that in those days it was probably a case of ‘having to get married’ and fortunately they felt enough for each other to make it work.  After a gap of eight years they had a daughter, Joan, and after a further seven years, Roger completed the family.

Meanwhile of Hugh and Susan’s other three children Kit had found work at Boots, the well-known chemists with its HQ in Nottingham.  In 1935, aged 23, she married Bernard Beck whose family owned a sweet-making business and sold them from a stall in the Central Market.  Grandfather Hugh made a rare appearance at their wedding before disappearing again for the next twenty years.

John, on the other hand, headed back down south, marrying Kath in 1936 and having two boys Patrick and David.  However, after a spell living in Epsom, they moved up to Nottingham in 1939 when John took a job with the Royal Ordnance Factory and they found a house in Carlton.

Roland, the youngest, followed a different route and strayed further afield.  He had spent most of his teenage years with the southern branch of the family and was 20 when the Second World War broke out.  He joined up and was assigned to various engineering projects and was based mainly in Whitehall.  He married Florence Holt and they had two children during the late forties, Richard and Jane.  Soon afterwards, they emigrated to Australia and he ended up working for UNESCO.  In later years they separated and he took up residence in Bangkok where he lived with his partner, Somchit, and her son.  They were terrific hosts when I visited for a week in 1983.

This all means that circumstances had combined to bring a large chunk of the family to settle in Nottingham.  Consequently during thirties, forties and fifties Dad, Joan and Roger grew up surrounded by uncles, aunts and seven cousins, all living within easy bus rides of each other. Their grandmother Susan would also be making regular visits to stay with one or another of her children. The bonds were further reinforced by the War.  Dud and Bern and their new brother-in-law Jim, all spent extended periods overseas and John was in a protected industry at the ROF.  This left the women having to cope with the challenges of both work and running the home during a time of rationing, uncertainty and concern.  It’s no wonder they looked to each other for mutual support and the ‘cousins’ spent hours in each other’s pockets.

Now let’s pop back in time again and take a look at the background that led Mabel, my grandmother, to meet and marry Dud in 1932.  It’s quite a complicated picture that involved a number of second marriages.

Her father, my great-grandfather, James Gray (12%) was born in 1858 in Derby to John and Mary Gray (6% each) who both came from the village of Willington, a few miles to the south-west of the city.  James was a wood turner by trade and married Caroline in 1879.  They lived in St Werburghs in Derby and had eight children but the large family was left without a mother in 1904 when Caroline died.  How James coped I don’t know, although, as was often the case, it is likely his brother and two sisters would have stepped in to help.  At some point though in the next couple of years he met Charlotte Hayman nee Marshall (12%), my great-grandmother, who had separated from her first husband in 1900, and it appears they moved in together.

Charlotte had been born in 1869, also in Derby, to William and Rebecca Marshall (6% each) who had married five years earlier aged just 18 and 19 respectively.  William, like his father, William Snr (3%) was a militiaman (a predecessor of the Territorials), played the fife and is also recorded as a labourer and fried fish dealer in various censuses.  Charlotte was one of eight children with four brothers and three sisters and by aged 12 she was working in Nottingham as a lace mender.  Little is known about her teenage years but in the 1891 census she is recorded as a barmaid at a pub in Lambeth, London and by age 21 she had married Henry Hayman, a coach driver 12 years her senior.  They had three children Florrie, Henry and Tom but it appears that all was not well because they separated soon after Tom’s birth and by 1901 Charlotte and the children had moved back to Derby to live with her parents.  It was here that she was introduced to the 48 year-old widower James Gray, soon after Caroline died in 1904.

Within a couple of years they had a daughter, my grandmother Josephine Mabel Gray (25%) although, as her parents weren’t married there is no father identified on the birth certificate.  This was again the case when James (jnr) was born in 1911 about the time the family moved to Beresford Street in Radford, Nottingham.  Shortly afterwards, in 1912, James and Charlotte married at the local registry office; the certificate shows Charlotte to be a widow so she presumably waited for Henry’s death, rather than seeking an expensive divorce.  We have never discovered what happened to the six children from James (snr)’s first marriage so somewhere out there are some step-great uncles and aunts of mine.

In the years leading up to The Great War, Mabel’s elder step-sister, Florrie, had gone ‘into service’ and moved to Bristol with a ‘well-to-do’ family.  Whilst in the area she met Ernest Fricker, supposedly a baker but whom the records show held a variety of itinerant jobs.  They were married in 1914 and, because he was in the military reserve, he was quickly called up and only three months afterwards he was on his way to France.  Tragedy struck the young newly-weds when Ernest died the following March, not in battle but of meningitis.  Florrie returned to Nottingham, living again with Charlotte and James for a period and working as a tram conductor before starting work as a resident housekeeper for a Nottingham family.  She never remarried and I well remember Florrie in her old-age;  a sparky, grey-haired lady living in a small terraced house with dark rooms, antiquated furniture and paintings, respected by my parents and who was always a guaranteed source of chocolate whenever we called in for a visit.

Meanwhile her older step-brother, Tom, had been posted to Egypt with the army during the war and re-joined civilian life as a policeman in Nottingham, marrying Violet in 1923 and having three children. 

Mabel left school in 1919 at the age of just 12!  She worked for Birkins. a well-known lace manufacturer and was joined there a few years later by her younger brother James Jnr (Jim).  This coincided with the death of their father James Snr which left Charlotte on her own to manage the family.  It would have been a struggle, in housing and living conditions that were often far from ideal but, as mentioned earlier, at some point towards the end of the Twenties she met Dudley Sheath.  By the time she was 24 in 1932 she was five months pregnant and they’d decided to get married.               

So for both of my paternal grandparents it’s not been an easy upbringing; any residual prosperity and affluence from previous generations has been diluted, lost or disinherited and they’ve grown up in poor areas of the city, leaving school at the earliest opportunity and with no career prospects to speak of.  Mabel, by all accounts, was a woman with an aspiration to better the lot of her family and held some deeply ingrained viewpoints on the role of the men in the family; undoubtedly this caused occasional friction with the less ambitious, more placid Dud, and later conflicted with the more modern outlook on career and families possessed by Dad her eldest son.  Initially for the young couple, things continued to be difficult and when Dad was born it remained hard, but we’ll pick up this story later because ‘on the other side of town a girl was waiting’.

Well, she would be in another 21 years’ time.  Back then she was a small four-year old child called Margaret Anthony.

Mum’s Side

There isn’t quite the same depth of knowledge along this branch of my family tree.  Mum was born in 1928 and was the only child of Harry and Ethel Anthony, (25% each) my grandparents.  They lived at 237 Mansfield Road in Redhill, Nottingham which they’d moved into straight after their marriage in 1925.  A recently built, large semi-detached, they shared the other half with Ethel’s younger brother, Arthur Pinder and his new wife, Doris.  Arthur ran his monumental stone business from a workshop in their large joint back garden.

Let’s begin with Harry’s side and head back to when we can first get a fix on his great-great grandfather, Joseph Anthony, (1.5%) who was born in Chesterfield in 1783.  A shoemaker, he married Hannah Greaves (1.5%) in 1803 and they had four sons before moving to Nottingham sometime between 1813 and 1819 finding a home in Arnold.  Here they had two more sons, the last one, Charles (3%), was born when Hannah was 43 in 1822 and only a couple of years before his father, Joseph, died.  The 1841 census reveals that Hannah was still alive and three of the brothers were settled in Arnold where they were all working as framework knitters in the city’s growing textile business.  Charles married Hannah Moore (3%) in 1846 and they had nine children, obviously not wanting to be outdone by his brothers, Joseph and James, both of whom had seven. No wonder the neighbourhood was expanding rapidly!  Front Street, Church Street, High Street and Folly Road have all survived the demolition wrecking ball and you can still find little terraced houses there for £120,000.  Imagine all these cousins running around in the local streets getting up to all sorts of mischief before the fun was knocked out of them in their early teens when they were packed off to the local factories to earn their keep.

Charles and Hannah’s third boy was also called Charles (6%).  Born in 1846, he too was a framework knitter and married seamstress, Ann Annibal, (6%) when he was 23. Setting a new family record they had eleven children; it must have been exhausting feeding, clothing and keeping control of such a large brood.  We’re not sure when either Charles or Ann died, probably of fatigue, but they could be proud of their offspring. I think it’s safe to say that the kids must have spent a lot of time playing football and cricket in the streets; two of them went onto play professional football for Blackburn Rovers before both succumbed in their prime to tuberculosis and two others played cricket for Notts.

For a few years I had a cricket ball with an engraved plate that commemorated Great Uncle George Anthony’s six wicket haul in for Notts in 1901.  Grandad Harry had acquired it somehow and my mate Robbo and I would throw catches to each other in my bedroom with the careful reverence the memento warranted; sadly I had to return it in the end to one of his direct descendent who finally took an interest in his family’s heirloom.

Their fourth child, Henry, (12%) didn’t follow the sporting route.  He broke away from the textile tradition and found work in the thriving mining industry in the north of the county, rising to become a colliery deputy and marrying my great grandmother, Maud Fisher, (12%) in 1900.  In another break from the family norm, they only had one child, born in April the same year, suggesting Henry might also have had to ‘do the right thing’.

Harry, my grandfather, might have been an only child but he grew up surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins all living in the Arnold area and he absorbed the sporting stories and passions of the wider family. His parents encouraged his education and he was destined for apprentice office work at the local colliery when war broke out.  Luckily he missed the worst of the Great War; called up in 1917 by the Navy, he never actually set foot on a ship. Thanks to his sporting prowess he was assigned to the ‘Physical Training’ Corps as a PT instructor and sent to the Navy’s London training centre at Crystal Palace.  On his return after the War, he started work in the collieries that were dotted across the villages of north Nottinghamshire, but never ended up at the coalface. Instead, probably due in part to his father’s position, he worked as a clerk and eventually progressed to a role selling equipment that was needed in the pits such as the coal trucks, winches, and pulley systems.

Inevitably he was a sportsman; well known in his teens for his sprinting ability and then after the War in the thriving local football scene, as a free-scoring centre-forward.  In his later days he would regularly remind us, his grandchildren, of the famous match in which he banged in all eight goals, (in borrowed boots apparently).  I can still recite the tales of how he’d always head a ball downwards so it was awkward for the goalie, that he ‘knew how to use his elbows’ or that he had a reputation for ghosting past defenders on their ‘blindside’.  I was probably in my mid-teens before I really appreciated what he meant by ‘nipping round the blindside.’  Back in the seventies, Leeds United had a striker called Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke who apparently had modelled his stealth-like goal scoring prowess on Harry Anthony’s technique.

The story goes that he turned out on a couple of occasions for Notts County, the oldest football club in the world, who were playing at the time in the old Second Division.  He claimed to have decided against pursuing a professional career at the 5/- a week they offered; apparently as a strong Methodist he felt uncomfortable with the card-playing and drinking culture that surrounded teams at the time.  Of course it’s also possible that he wasn’t good enough to be offered a full-time contract but we’ll never know.                                                        

He met Ethel Pinder my grandmother, through the local Methodist scene.  She was just a year older than him and the second of four children living in Redhill with my great grandparents Samuel and Ada, (12% each), who’d married in 1893.  Samual was the superintendent at the local cemetery, just a short walk up the Mansfield Road from Arnold where the Anthony clan resided.  This represented something of a step up as the three previous generations on both sides were predominantly framework knitters living around the villages just to the north of the city.  Again, back through the generations, large families were the norm, and Ethel wasn’t short of uncles, aunts and cousins in addition to her three siblings.  She was described as a secretary on her marriage certificate and her wedding to a local sporting star was a noteworthy event in the Arnold area, especially within the strong Methodist community. The reputation and uprightness of both families probably helped them secure the big, comfortable home on Mansfield Road they moved into in 1925.  It was here, in June 1928, that Mum was born, just a year after Samual, her grandfather, died and was buried in the cemetery he’d cared for.  Great grandmother Ada lived another twenty years, long enough to see Mum grow up but not quite long enough to meet the 18 year-old boy she  cautiously introduced to her parents in 1950.

We’ll meet Dud, Mabel, Harry and Ethel in the next family-orientated chapter.

Anniversary Party Numbers - reality check required.

We need to ensure we’ve made suitable catering arrangements so let’s just do a check on how many guests might turn up to our ‘Three Hundredth Year Family Reunion.’

We’ll have to make some guesses so let’s assume that during the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th centuries each couple have four children whilst more recently it’s only two point four kids per family.

And we’re going back to Abraham’s and his wife’s generation, my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents who were born around 300 years ago.

Em… at this generational level there are 64 couples all happily passing on into the future their genetic code.

If they average four children per couple that’s 256 of the next generation all need inviting.  I could limit it to just my 64 direct relatives (32 couples) but then would miss out on meeting 192 distant cousins.

So let’s stick with inviting cousins for the moment. By the next generation (great grandparents x4) I’m down to 32 direct relatives but the number of cousins has risen by another factor of four to 1024.  It looks like we’re going to need to hire the town hall for this do.

Follow the trend?  If I’ve got my maths right, by the time we’ve included my four grandparents, Dud and Mabel, Harry and Ethel, there are 65,536 cousins out there, all of whom share a tiny bit of the gene make-up that’s in me from one of the original 128 relatives we chose to start with. 

I’ve just enquired about Wembley Stadium’s availability.

Okay.  Luckily my parents’ generation decided that having two point four children was more appropriate which manages to hold the final number to 629,145.  I’ve assumed there’s not been any inter-marriage within all these cousins but I do wonder; it will have been hard, even unlikely, especially for the latest generations to have avoided bumping unknowingly into a distant relative, even if the family diaspora would have increasingly spread some of these relatives to the far-flung corners of the earth.

And that raises another unfortunate likelihood. We know there is an international element to my DNA that comes from the branch that emanated in Germany.  Consequently it’s highly probable that a few of cousins would have been taking pot-shots at each other on at least two occasions in the last hundred years.

Maybe this party needs to be spread across a few days.  I wonder if I should speak to the Eavis family about using their Glastonbury Festival site?  And it’s not going to be cheap so I think we need to ask for contributions.  How about the equivalent of £10 per couple?  That would be 5/- (shillings) for my grand-parents, and 8d (pennies) for my great-great grandparents that includes Abraham and Maria Sheath and William and Rebecca Marshall.  The first Abraham and his generation back in the 18th century would only need to find 5d although they might be equally as inclined to offer some produce from their fields or workshop. 

Just a thought.  What ‘age’ would you choose to be at such a party?  Young, under 30 perhaps?  At this age you’d certainly be able to cope with the drink and late night, maybe even flirt a bit with cousins many times removed.  On the other hand, you probably wouldn’t be overly-interested in the life stories and relationships of all those earlier relatives so it might be a wasted opportunity.  Thirty-something?  Probably distracted by having to keep your young kids in line and stop them running wild at the event.  I think a mature forty-something is the best bet.  Hopefully you’re still looking half-decent, with enough wisdom to engage properly in all the conversations and enough empathy to fully appreciate the achievements, hardships, disasters and triumphs of all the other guests.

Let’s send the invites and see who turns up; it will be brilliant to put faces to names and check out the authenticity of some of the family folklore and anecdotes.

FAMILY TREE

Bit of a squeeze but have managed to get all the key individuals on.

Summary of main points.

It covers nine generations

Oldest link is circa 1740: the generation from which are identified two out of a possible 128 of my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents each of whom has passed on 0.75% of their genetic make-up to me.

It excludes my ‘second’ uncles, aunts and cousins.