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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Genealogy, heraldry, names and honours > Family history
Blood on the Thistle is an examination of the life and times of a
remarkable Scottish family, the Cranstons of Haddington, East
Lothian. It focuses on a period from about 1880, when the young,
hard-working parents, Alec and Lizzie Cranston, arrived in
Haddington, through to 1920, when the family they had produced,
torn apart by the Great War, broke up as its surviving members
pursued separate lives around the globe. Of seven sons who served
in the First World War, four died and two more were horrifically
wounded; only one, the youngest, returned home physically
unscathed. This book explores the effects of this extreme sacrifi
ce on the sons themselves as well as the loved ones they left
behind, particularly their mother, Lizzie, who mourned them for the
rest of her days. This is the tale of how a once proud and
aspirational Scottish family was devastated by war, and how the
effects continued to ripple through time and generations. Until, a
century later, the threads of this remarkable family are finally
drawn together again, in a book that is at once a superb
documentary account and a moving tribute to a generation.
Tracing Your Glasgow Ancestors is a volume in the series of city
ancestral guides published by Pen & Sword for readers and
researchers who want to find out about life in Glasgow in the past
and to know where the key sources for its history can be found. In
vivid detail it describes the rise of Glasgow through tobacco,
shipping, manufacturing and trade from a minor cathedral town to
the cosmopolitan centre of the present day. Ian Maxwell's book
focuses on the lives of the local people both rich and poor and on
their experience as Glasgow developed around them. It looks at
their living conditions, at health and the ravages of disease, at
the influence of religion and migration and education. It is the
story of the Irish and Highland migrants, Quakers, Jews, Irish,
Italians, and more recently people from the Caribbean, South-Asia
and China who have made Glasgow their home. A wealth of information
on the city and its people is available, and Glasgow Ancestors is
an essential guide for anyone researching its history or the life
of an individual ancestor. institutions, clubs, societies and
schools.
Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex
Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of
family trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that had endured
for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled,
enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal
grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph
Stalin - to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet
totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his
family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to
revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious
anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that
the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and
indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his
glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet
ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric
hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz
and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that
of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing
project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with
identity, feelings of rootlessness and a yearning for home. He
comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons
who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of
politics and history. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his
family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational
transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes
to realize something more: nations, like people, possess formative
traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their
citizens' lives.
Few previous publications have focused on Welsh family history, and
none have provided a comprehensive guide to the genealogical
information available and where to find it. That is why the
publication of Beryl Evans's new Welsh family history handbook is
such a significant event in the field. Her detailed, accessible,
authoritative guide will be essential reading and reference for
anyone who is eager to research ancestors from Wales. She describes
the key archival sources and shows how the development of new
technology, the internet in particular, has made them so much
easier to explore. Drawing on her long experience of family history
work, she gives clear practical advice on how to start a research
project, and she sketches in the outlines of Welsh history, Welsh
surnames and place-names and the Welsh language. But the main body
of her book is devoted to identifying the variety of sources
researchers can consult - the archive repositories, including The
National Library of Wales, civil records of all kinds, the census,
parish registers, wills, the records of churches, chapels, schools,
businesses, tax offices and courts, and the wide range of printed
records.Beryl Evans's handbook will be a basic text for researchers
of Welsh descent and for anyone who is keen to learn about Welsh
history.
Birth, marriage and death records are an essential resource for
family historians, and this handbook is an authoritative
introduction to them. It explains the original motives for
registering these milestones in individual lives, describes how
these record-keeping systems evolved, and shows how they can be
explored and interpreted. Authors David Annal and Audrey Collins
guide researchers through the difficulties they may encounter in
understanding the documentation. They recount the history of parish
registers from their origin in Tudor times, they look at how civil
registration was organized in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries and explain how the system in England and Wales differs
from those in Scotland and Ireland. The record-keeping practised by
nonconformist and foreign churches, in communities overseas and in
the military is also explained, as are the systems of the Isle of
Man and the Channel Islands. Other useful sources of evidence for
births, marriages and deaths are explored and, of course, the
authors assess the online sites that researchers can turn to for
help in this crucial area of family history research.
This title helps the reader understand how to go about researching
their family tree, starting with the basics. This practical book
will have you achieving immediate results using: a friendly, visual
approach simple language practical, task-based examples large,
full-colour screenshots. Discover everything you want to know about
using online tools and services to research your family history in
this easy-to-use guide; from the most essential tasks that you'll
want to perform, to solving the most common problems you'll
encounter.
Whatever Remains is a true story. The fall of Singapore is
considered one of Britain's worst defeats of the Second World War.
For Penny Graham's father, however, it became a life-changing
opportunity to shed once and for all, all of the shackles of a
family he no longer wanted. From 1942 onwards her parents would
carry passports that gave them backgrounds that had nothing to do
with reality. In 2010, a recognised Australian author claimed that
her father and mother were involved in espionage for the British
Government before, during and after World War 2. Although he worked
in Australian naval intelligence during the war, there is no
evidence whatsoever that he was an MI6 spy. He clearly had his own
motives for the change of identity but they had nothing to do with
espionage. Penny Graham spent most of her adult life unravelling
the truth about her family history. Her journey took her around the
world twice, on many twists and turns, false leads and dead ends as
she discovers hew her father managed to hoodwink so many people in
his long and complex life. Whatever Remains is a beautifully
written story about solving mysteries, conquering adversity and
ultimately finding where you belong in the world. It's a slice of
history worth telling.
This handy book is a timeline guide to genealogical resources -
what records are available and when they started - as well as an
aide-memoire to significant historical events from 1066 to 2020;
helping to put family ancestors into an historical context. Each
page in this book has a main column with facts of genealogical
relevance in the broadest sense; a side column makes mention of
events of socio-cultural significance and events relating to the
monarchy, the State and the Church. Entries cover historical and
genealogical aspects of all four countries of the UK plus Ireland
and the Channel Islands, as well as significant historical events
in the wider world that had an impact here. The timeline is
especially strong on the contribution of migration, extreme
weather, disasters, epidemics, wars, non-conformist religions,
taxation, transport, the armed services, famine, empire, organised
labour, social writers, mapmakers, political unrest and scientific
advances. Genealogically, there is information on changes to BMD
certificates and the associated register entries, as well as to
censuses and the facts they collected, plus much more. There are
also references to earlier records that generated name indexes such
as muster rolls and poll taxes, how complete they are and where
they can be found. By being reasonably balanced across the
centuries, the authors have resisted the temptation to include
excessive detail on recent history. This book will help the family
historian to construct a timeline for their ancestors, providing a
fairly full set of historical events, developments and records
likely to have had an impact on them, their family and community.
It is a handy reference guide to a myriad of dates but is also a
useful book to study when writing a family history as it offers
plenty of contextual information. It should also prompt readers to
search out new resources in tracing their ancestors.
This title offers accessible and clear advice on discovering your
family's history in the UK, explaining the best research
techniques, how to log and collate your research. It contains all
the information needed to start your own search including a useful
checklist to guide through each stage. You can experience the
amazing thrill of tracing back your bloodline hundreds of years and
discovering who your ancestors were and what their lives were like.
It contains over 135 illustrations, including diagrams,
contemporaneous photographs, document facsimiles, sample family
trees and artworks. It includes sections on Welsh, Scottish, Irish
and Channel Island records, as well as English. This book
introduces the subject of genealogy in a highly practical form, and
explains the process of tracing and finding ancestors in the
British Isles in a simple and easy-to-follow way. The book begins
with the very basics of starting to research, guiding the reader
through each stage, from finding clues in photographs and naming
patterns, to creating drop-line charts and starting to draw up a
family tree. The next section goes back to the early 1800s, and
explains how to take investigations further by using all kinds of
sources, both in archive form and on the internet, especially
census information. The book also goes on to explain how to find
relatives through their professions, apprenticeships, education,
and military records. This useful guide to genealogy will help you
discover your roots, identify your British ancestors, and unlock
the secrets of your family heritage.
"I never missed my childhood home / until the tide stopped rolling
in and / ochre sand no longer crunched between my toes ..." A
little girl grows up to the sounds of the seaside in bustling
Cleethorpes. There are family outings through the Lincolnshire
Wolds in a tiny Austin 7, and ferry rides across the Humber. Family
runs like a comforting thread throughout this 'little gem of a
book', and lifelong friendships are forged in unexpected places ...
A gentle and heartfelt memoir about the timeless call of the sea
What does a writer do when he's got a family that includes a
blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten, the brains behind Tony the
Tiger and the Marlboro Man, a trio of gay puppeteers, the world's
leading birdwatcher, sixties hippies, a Dutch stowaway who served
in an all-black regiment during the American Civil War, a mother of
unusual compassion and understanding, and a convicted murderer? He
tells their stories and secrets, illuminating 150 years of American
life along the way. Dan Bessie begins the journey through his
family history with his great-grandfather in the cargo hold of a
ship bound for New York on the storm-tossed Atlantic. What follows
are stories of his grandfather's various entrepreneurial schemes
(including a folding butter box business), a grandmother who was
voted "New York's Prettiest Shop Girl" (and who resisted the
recruitment efforts of various city madams), and his uncle Harry's
Turnabout Theater in Los Angeles (a renowned puppet theater drawing
patrons as diverse as Shirley Temple, Ray Bradbury, and Albert
Einstein). Through inherited journals and literary effects, Bessie
comes to a new understanding of his father, Alvah. An actor and
writer, he fought in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil
War. When he returned to the States, he headed to the Warner back
lots to begin a screenwriting career. But as congress began
investigating radicals in the film industry, Alvah was blacklisted
for his Communist sympathies and was soon sent to jail as one of
the Hollywood Ten. His grandmother's cousin, Sidney Lenz, wrote
Lenz on Bridge, a classic guide to the game of contract bridge.
Bessie describes what was billed as the Bridge Battle of the
Century, a 1931 match between Lenz and an upstart opponent that was
covered by journalists from all over the world. Bessie's
brother-in-law Wes Wilson designed rock and roll posters for the
Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco during the 1960s, living a
counterculture existence vastly different from the bridge-mad
Depression Era. Cousin Michael was heir to the compulsive
storytelling characterizing many of the Bessies. He found his niche
in publishing, co-founding the Atheneum Press and shaping books by
people such as Anwar Sadat, Edward Albee, and Aldous Huxley. With
an equally impressive career, Uncle Leo built the country's fifth
largest advertising agency. A passion of a different sort led
cousin Phoebe Snetsinger to travel from Webster Groves, Missouri,
to the far corners of Africa and Asia. The world's leading birder,
she sighted 8,400 different birds-nearly 85 percent of the species
known to exist. An extraordinary strain of creativity runs through
the Bessie and Burnett clans, and Rare Birds celebrates the
colorful diversity of a remarkable and accomplished family. While
their choices and professions run the gamut of the American
experience in the twentieth century, the history of the nation can
be traced in these people's lives. Bessie's passionate birds of a
feather gather to sing their unique song across decades and
generations. Dan Bessie has been a film writer, director, producer,
and animator since apprenticing on Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM in
1956.
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