Who do you think you are?
Who Do You Think You Are?
We’re fairly certain many of you will have watched this show, either in the UK or USA. A one hour show that traces a celebrity’s family tree back generations and you’ve been amazed by what they ‘dig-up’. What you don’t see is the team of Genealogists and researchers behind the scenes for weeks preparing the information and creating that show. For over 13 years we have been consumed by this amazing hobby which has now become a small home based business for us.
We started with a handwritten tree covering one side of Tony’s tree. Painstakingly written on the back of a piece of wallpaper by an aunt of his, everyone called her Auntie Joan though she was really a distant cousin. From that simple tree we now have over 15,500 people in our collective tree going back many generations in the UK, USA and Canada. Along the way we’ve discovered a few skeletons and many new and extended families that we visit as often as we can.
The Cousins clan originated in Suffolk, England and we have links there going back to the mid 1500’s. They met up with the Franklins, originating around Trowbridge in Wiltshire and settled in West Ham just outside London. Tony’s father moved north to Manchester just after the Second World War and met his mother – a Taylor. The Taylor tribe had ancestors from Shropshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire.
We have many stories from the people we’ve met, some hilarious from Tony’s Uncle George Taylor and some touching from one of the discovered Cousins clan in Suffolk. We find that the most interesting information is often contained in those stories that would have been lost in time. Now they sit out there on our web site in the big old Internet for all to see. Not just stories – we see how the Industrial Revolution in England changed how people worked, how they moved about the country, how they no longer stayed in the same village all of their lives. On the Cousins’ side the most common occupation in those early days in Suffolk was agricultural laborer – working the fields, Tony’s great-great grandfather was a thatcher, and his grandfather was a policeman in West Ham, Plumstead and Guildford.
The Taylor side was more involved in weaving and cotton or silk spinning in Lancashire. Tony’s Taylor grandfather worked in a hat shop in Failsworth just north of Manchester, His mother was one of a family of seven – two of her sisters died soon after they were born, the rest were all boys – she’s tough.
Connie’s family was a real challenge – the Sturdevant and Leavell families, two fairly uncommon names we thought would be easy to trace – we were wrong. A lot of families in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries could not read or write very well, if at all, and census and vital record takers would very often have to rely on the phonetics to document a name. So now we have Sturtevant, Sturdivant, Levil, Levell and a few other alternative spellings.
As for occupation on Connie’s side, one branch of the tree was mainly stage performers or artistes as they were called in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Her grandparents were involved in tent shows in and around Texas and New Mexico, travelling between towns – raising their tent, performing for 2 or 3 nights and then moving on to the next town. Her great-great grandfather Henry Thomas Baker who was born in London had 4 children who all took to the stage at some time in their lives. One was Maurice Chevalier’s manager for a while; and also a performer who was known as ‘The Lazy Juggler’. For a number of years we wondered what became of Augustus Baker, another of the children – his grandson found our web site and got in touch with us just 2 years ago – now we know that Augustus Baker changed his name to Gus Chevalier and married a dancer from the Folies Bergere in Paris. Connie also has ancestors who fought in the American Civil War – on both sides, also some who fought the British in the War of Independence and that side goes back to the late 1600’s in Connecticut – not quite back to the Mayflower – but we’re still looking.