'Excellent . . . bursting with extraordinary women' - Anita Anand 'Brilliant' - Daisy Buchanan "My hope is that this book will inspire as I have been inspired. It's a love letter to the importance of history and about how, without knowing where we come from - truthfully and entirely - we cannot know who we are." Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries is a celebration of unheard and under-heard women's history. Within these pages you'll meet nearly 1000 women whose names deserve to be better known: from the Mothers of Invention and the trailblazing women at the Bar; warrior queens and pirate commanders; the women who dedicated their lives to the natural world or to medicine; those women of courage who resisted and fought for what they believed; to the unsung heroes of stage, screen and stadium. It is global, travelling the world and spanning all periods of time. It is also an intensely moving detective story of the author's own family history as Kate Mosse pieces together the forgotten life of her great-grandmother, Lily Watson, a famous and highly-successful novelist in her day who has all but disappeared from the record . . . Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries is accessible, ambitious in its scope and fascinating in its detail. A beautifully illustrated dictionary of women, it is a love letter to family history and a personal memoir about the nature of women's struggles to be heard and their achievements acknowledged. Joyous, celebratory and engaging, it is a book for everyone who has ever wondered how history is made.

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.

In Lives Between the Lines, Michael Vatikiotis traces the journey of his Greek and Italian forebears from Tuscany, Crete, Hydra and Rhodes, as they made their way to Egypt and the coast of Palestine in search of opportunity. In the process, he reveals a period where the Middle East was a place of ethnic and cultural harmony - where Arabs and Jews rubbed shoulders in bazaars and teashops, intermarried and shared family history. While lines were eventually drawn and people, including Vatikiotis's family, found themselves caught between clashing faiths, contested identities and violent conflict, this intimate and sweeping memoir is a paean to tolerance, offering a nuanced understanding of the lost Levant.

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.

This book is a personal journey into the family archives of photographer Paul Weinberg. As a child his sorties into an old black trunk that the family had at home where he encountered stamps, letters, photographs and most importantly postcards, excited his imagination to a world far beyond the borders of South Africa and the African continent. They became a collection of connections to his grandparents, to their 'roots' in eastern Europe and his own. The book explores his past as he retraces his family footprints in South Africa. It takes him to far-flung small towns in the interior of South Africa where the family eventually found a niche for themselves in the hotel trade. In the form of postcards to his great grandfather, Edward, it is on one hand a visual narrative of this journey and on another a multi-layered travel book as he pieces the jigsaw of his family's footprints together. A sub-theme of the book is a story of the 'old hotel' which was at one point so central and dynamic in the lives of many of these small towns. Weinberg revisits these hotels and explores their whereabouts, and their evolution. Weaving history, historiographies, memoir and archive into a personal pilgrimage, this book offers fresh insights and perspectives on a family who made this country their 'adopted home'. Through the metaphor of the postcard this book sets up a dialogue between the author, his great grandfather, the past and the present, and asks important questions about who writes history, and who is left out.

A fascinating family memoir from Joseph O'Neill, author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted and Richard & Judy pick, 'Netherland'. Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers - one Irish, one Turkish - were both imprisoned during the Second World War. The Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA and was interned with hundreds of his comrades. O'Neill's other grandfather, a hotelier from a tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was imprisoned by the British in Palestine, on suspicion of being a spy. At the age of thirty, Joseph O'Neill set out to uncover his grandfather's stories, what emerges is a narrative of two families and two charismatic but flawed men - it is a story of murder, espionage, paranoia and fear, of memories of violence and of fierce commitments to political causes.

Expertly contextualized by two leading historians in the field, this unique collection offers 13 accounts of individual experiences of World War II from across Europe. It sees contributors describe their recent ancestors' experiences ranging from a Royal Air Force pilot captured in Yugoslavia and a Spanish communist in the French resistance to two young Jewish girls caught in the siege of Leningrad. Contributors draw upon a variety of sources, such as contemporary diaries and letters, unpublished postwar memoirs, video footage as well as conversations in the family setting. These chapters attest to the enormous impact that war stories of family members had on subsequent generations. The story of a father who survived Nazi captivity became a lesson in resilience for a daughter with personal difficulties, whereas the story of a grandfather who served the Nazis became a burden that divided the family. At its heart, Family Histories of World War II concerns human experiences in supremely difficult times and their meaning for subsequent generations.

Niall Ferguson's House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets 1798-1848 was hailed as "definitive" by the New York Times, a "great biography" by Time magazine, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 1998 by Business Week. Now, Ferguson concludes his myth--breaking portrait of one of the most powerful families of modern times at the zenith of its power. From Crimea to World War II, wars repeatedly threatened the stability of the Rothschild's worldwide empire. Despite these upheavals, theirs remained the biggest bank in the world up until the First World War. Yet the Rothschild's failure to establish themselves successfully in the United States proved fateful, and as financial power shifted from London to New York after 1914, their power waned. At once a classic family saga and major work of economic, social and political history, The House of Rothschild is the riveting story of an unparalleled dynasty.

Containing entries for more than 45,000 English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cornish, and immigrant surnames, The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland is the ultimate reference work on family names of the UK. The Dictionary includes every surname that currently has more than 100 bearers. Each entry contains lists of variant spellings of the name, an explanation of its origins (including the etymology), lists of early bearers showing evidence for formation and continuity from the date of formation down to the 19th century, geographical distribution, and, where relevant, genealogical and bibliographical notes, making this a fully comprehensive work on family names. This authoritative guide also includes an introductory essay explaining the historical background, formation, and typology of surnames and a guide to surnames research and family history research. Additional material also includes a list of published and unpublished lists of surnames from the Middle Ages to the present day.

"The book is a treasure house of immensely informative material. . . . An important addition to the small body of English-language works on the conditions of late Tokugawa society, told at a very human level."--Comparative Studies in Society and History

This fully revised second edition of Chris Paton's best-selling guide is essential reading if you want to make effective use of the internet in your family history research. Every day new records and resources are placed online and new methods of sharing research and communicating across cyberspace become available, and his handbook is the perfect introduction to them. He has checked and updated all the links and other sources, added new ones, written a new introduction and substantially expanded the social networking section. Never before has it been so easy to research family history using the internet, but he demonstrates that researchers need to take a cautious approach to the information they gain from it. They need to ask, where did the original material come from and has it been accurately reproduced, why was it put online, what has been left out and what is still to come? As he leads the researcher through the multitude of resources that are now accessible online, he helps to answer these questions. He shows what the internet can and cannot do, and he warns against the various traps researchers can fall into along the way.

William Cavendish, the father of the first Earl, dissolved monasteries for Henry VIII. Bess, his second wife, was gaoler-companion to Mary Queen of Scots during her long imprisonment in England. Arbella Stuart, their granddaughter, was a heartbeat away from the throne of England and their grandson, the Lord General of the North, fought to save the crown for Charles I. With the help of previously unpublished material from the Chatsworth archives, The Devonshires reveals how the dynasty made and lost fortunes, fought and fornicated, built great houses, patronised the arts and pioneered the railways, made great scientific discoveries, and, in the end, came to terms with changing times.

Dear Granny (sketch design) is an award-winning journal filled with over 60 fun and inspiring questions carefully created to inspire any grandmother to tell her story - probably one of the most valuable gifts you will ever buy. Everyone has stories to share about their own amazing life and it is so important to find ways to capture and treasure them. Dear Granny contains 60 carefully designed questions to ask her about her life. Ask her to complete it carefully, adding photos and memorabilia along the way. Find out how things have changed throughout her life, what things did she do as a child that are different from today. What were her own parents really like and what adventures has she had in her life. Discover what your own mum or dad was like when they were young! What about your own relationship with your grandmother, what are her favourite memories of the times you have spent together and is there any advice she would like to give you? When you get her completed journal returned to you, this will be one of the most emotional presents you have ever received. A great gift for Mother's Day, Grandparent's Day, her birthday, an anniversary, Christmas or just because you care ...