Following the passing of both his parents, this client wanted to find out about his roots and, within 24 hours, I presented him with a tree showing all his paternal grandfather’s siblings together with their dates of birth, marriage and death as well as their respective children. However, one great-uncle, Emmanuel, eluded me but, after searching for variations of his name, I found out that he had served in the 9th Battalion of the Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment during the First World War. Manuel (the name on his war record) was killed at the age of 20 on 4 July 1916 at the Battle of Albert and buried at the Thiepval Memorial in France. Manuel was posthumously awarded the 1914-1915 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. 

Coincidentally, my own grandfather was wounded 3 days earlier in the same battle, and  I also discovered that my client's 2nd cousin and my 2nd cousin had married a pair of brothers!

This client was simply interested in whether any of her ancestors had been JPs like herself, and my research revealed that both her 4x and 5x grandfathers had been JPs in the 1700. Tracing further back to the 16th century, it transpired that my client's 12x great grandfather, Sir John Blount, was a courtier to King Henry VIII, accompanying him to the famous meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and one of his daughters, Bessie Blount, was lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon and mistress to the King, bearing him his only son, Henry Fitzroy, 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset. 

But the royal connection did not stop there ... continuing through Sir John's maternal line revealed that my client's 21x great grandfather was King John, son of King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her 25x great grandfather was William the Conqueror!

Mary, a childless widow, passed away in January 2018 leaving no will and, other than a spinster sister with advanced dementia, had no known family. In helping to clear her effects at the beginning of July, we came across a large envelope of family records dating back to the early 19th century from which I started to build her family tree. Whilst both her parents had siblings who never married, I eventually found and made contact with Mary’s 3rd cousin who never even knew she existed.

This client had been told that one of his maternal grandfather’s brothers, Uncle Charlie, had been “given £5 and sent away in disgrace” as a young man, but no-one in the family ever knew what became of him, other than he had changed his surname from Marks to Martin. In 2015, I found him in the passenger manifest of HMS Athenia that had left Glasgow on 29 July 1905 and arrived in Québec, Canada, on 6 August 1905. I also discovered his marriage to Florence Dove Bruce in Toronto on 27 October 1915, and that he died on 3 April 1949 in Toronto where he is buried in St James’ Cemetery.

Susie began researching her own family tree over 30 years ago and has traced her ancestors back 15 generations to the beginning of the 16th century. She also discovered that a number of long-standing friends were in fact her 4th cousins!

At the beginning of 2019, Susie started studying for a Higher Certificate in Genealogy with the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies and, since discovering that her 5th great-grandmother was born in Norwich at the end of the 18th century, has been a member of the Norfolk Family History Society for whom she helped to transcribe the East Wymer 1915 birth register returns.

Based just north of London, Susie has Reader's Tickets for the National Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives, as well as for various regional archive offices including Sheffield, Stafford and those in the County Archive Research Network. She is also a member of the Society of Genealogists.