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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Genealogy, heraldry, names and honours > Family history
'A triumphant family memoir' Hallie Rubenhold 'Powerfully told...an
impressive work' The Times 'Gives a voice to the voiceless'
Australian Book Review In this remarkable book, Carmen Callil
discovers the story of her British ancestors, beginning with her
great-great grandmother Sary Lacey, born in 1808, an impoverished
stocking frame worker. Through detailed research, we follow Sary
from slum to tenement and from pregnancy to pregnancy. We also meet
George Conquest, a canal worker and the father of one of Sary's
children. George was sentenced - for a minor theft - to seven
years' transportation to Australia, where he faced the
extraordinary brutality of convict life. But for George, as for so
many disenfranchised British people like him, Australia turned out
to be his Happy Day. He survived, prospered and eventually returned
to England, where he met Sary again, after nearly thirty years. He
brought her out to Australia, and they were never parted again. A
miracle of research and fuelled by righteous anger, Oh Happy Day is
a story of Empire, migration and the inequality and injustice of
nineteenth-century England. 'A remarkable tale...drawing chilling
parallels to the inequalities of our times' Observer
In every pub in every town unspoken stories lie beneath the surface.
Each week, six women meet at The Bluebell Inn. They form an unlikely and occasionally triumphant ladies darts team. They banter and jibe, they laugh. But their hidden stories of love and loss are what, in the end, will bind them.
There is Mary, full of it but cradling her dark secret; Lena - young and bold, she has made her choice; the cat woman who must return to the place of her birth before it's too late. There's Maggie, still laying out the place for her husband; and Pegs, the dark-eyed girl from the travellers' site bringing her strangeness and first love. And Katy: unappreciated. Open to an offer.
They know little of each other's lives. But here they gather and weave a delicate and sustaining connection that maybe they can rely on as the crossroads on their individual paths threaten to overwhelm.
With humanity and insight, Kit Fielding reveals the great love that lies at the heart of female friendship.
Raw, funny and devastating, all of life can be found at the Bluebell.
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1877 Edition.
A reflection, in chapters, on the lives of members of the author's
family, their friends and neighbours who lived in Orleans and
Caledonia counties between the end of the eighteenth and the middle
of the twentieth centuries. Hard-working, God-fearing, and often
clever, these were literate, respectable, and fairly well-off
folks. They were, also, all too human - and certainly not always
'nice' or admirable'. The history that spills out from this archive
- of documents, letters and postcards, diaries, photographs and
oral history - encompasses family tales, curses and scandals; the
working lives of farmers, store-keepers, merchants and railway men;
education, teenage life, and courtship; building homes and becoming
consumers; serving in the militia and in war; early tourism, and
local entertainments; with a discursion on Vermont family names
along the way. It is a fascinating story, generously illustrated
with reproductions of documents and photographs.
This book is a transcription of the 1930 population census of Guam.
It begins with an overview and some observations of the census in
general. Each census page contained is simply a transcription from
what was handwritten and into a type written format. It serves as a
tool to make it a little easier for fellow genealogy researchers
during the course of their work.
James Edward Aiguier was born in New York City. He was educated
there and later in Philadelphia at the Evans Institute of the
University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine. He would
become a leading figure in his profession. This is the story of his
paternal ancestry descending from four immigrants: Joshua Carter
and Zechariah Field, both English Puritans, and Jean Francois
Arnoux and Jean Baptiste Aiguier, both from the south of France.
They and their offspring lived in the heart of the American story
from 1630 to 1977 in the midst of important moments in its history.
Carter and Field's great grandson John Carter at the age of nine
was kidnapped by the French-led expedition to raid Deerfield,
Massachusetts, in 1704. He was taken to Montreal, educated by an
order of monks, and became a citizen in New France with a new name,
Jean Chartier. Another immigrant, Jean Francois Arnoux, a surgeon
on a French navy frigate, sailed with Admiral de Grasse to Yorktown
in 1781 to assist the United States defeat the British in that
famous battle. Injured in the battle, Arnoux remained in the new
country, made his way to Montreal, Canada, to marry the
granddaughter of Jean Chartier. Their daughter Mary Cecile would
marry French immigrant Jean Baptiste Aiguier in 1816 and raise a
family in New York City. Their great grandson was James Edward
Aiguier born in 1883, died in 1977.
Nell Hannah was born in rural Aberdeenshire in 1920 and grew in
Turriff, where her family scraped a meagre living as domestic and
farm servants. After the outbreak of World War Two, Nell and her
sister Margaret moved with their mother to Perthshire, where all
three got jobs at the Stanley Mill. At the time, it was running
full tilt to produce webbing for military requirements and despite
long hours and austere conditions; Nell recalls her years as a mill
lassie as being memorably happy. In conversation with folklorist
Margaret Bennett and long-time friend and fellow-singer, Doris
Rougvie, Nell shares a life-time of reminiscences and songs. In
recalling the hey-day of an industry that shut down in the 1980s,
she constructs an oral history of life in war-time Perthshire.
Then, following life's paths with its twists and turns, Nell tells
how, at the age of sixty-nine, she discovered her gift of singing
and entertaining. Having made her first recording, a cassette, at
the age of seventy, and her fifth, a CD, at the age of 90, Nell can
hold an audience in the palm of her hand.
The highly praised biography of an archetypal great house and the
family who lived there for over 250 years. 'The Big House' is the
biography of a great country house and the lives of the Sykes
family who lived there, with varying fates, for the next two
hundred and fifty years. It is a fascinating social history set
against the backdrop of a changing England, with a highly
individual, pugnacious and self-determining cast, including: 'Old
Tat' Sykes, said to be one of the great sights of Yorkshire (the
author's great-great-great-grandfather), who wore 18th-century
dress to the day of his death at ninety-one in 1861. His son was
similarly eccentric, wearing eight coats that he discarded
gradually throughout the day in order to keep his body temperature
at a constant. He was forced to marry, aged forty-eight,
eighteen-year-old Jessica Cavendish-Bentick - a lively and highly
intelligent woman who relieved the boredom of her marriage by
acquiring a string of lovers, writing novels and throwing
extravagant parties (her nickname became 'Lady Satin Tights'), all
the while accumulating debts that ended in a scandalous court case.
Their son, Mark, died suddenly whilst brokering the peace
settlement at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I;
Sledmere was destroyed by fire shortly afterwards. But the rebuilt
Sledmere rose from the flames to resound again with colourful,
brilliant characters in the 1920s and 1930s including the author's
grandmother, Lily, who had been a celebrated bohemian in Paris.
'The Big House' is vividly written and meticulously researched
using the Sykes' own family's papers and photographs. In this
splendid biography of place and time, Christopher Simon Sykes has
resuscitated the lives of his ancestors and their glorious home
from the 18th- through to the 20th-century.
Who are we, and where do we come from? The fundamental drive to
answer these questions is at the heart of Finding Your Roots, the
companion book to the PBS documentary series seen by 30 million
people. As Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. shows us, the
tools of cutting-edge genomics and deep genealogical research now
allow us to learn more about our roots, looking further back in
time than ever before. Gates's investigations take on the personal
and genealogical histories of more than twenty luminaries,
including United States Congressman John Lewis, actor Robert Downey
Jr., CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, President of the
""Becoming American Institute"" Linda Chavez, and comedian Margaret
Cho. Interwoven with their moving stories of immigration,
assimilation, strife, and success, Gates provides practical
information for amateur genealogists just beginning archival
research on their own families' roots, and he details the advances
in genetic research now available to the public. The result is an
illuminating exploration of who we are, how we lost track of our
roots, and how we can find them again.
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