Part One: A new attempt

For some time I have been interested in my own family history. Even without interest or knowledge of the series Who do you think you are?, or without their vast resources.

A while back I created a rather basic family tree, listing great grandparents and one or two names attached as maybes.

A few months ago now I decided to give things a real go and see how far back I could go. Fill in all the gaps that had been bothering me.

To that end, I went the full go and actually paid for actual membership on the site Find my past uk. No sense in half arsing something this important. Not this time.

I found people, I found names and professions to people I only had had scraps of information up to now. Dates and everything. Births, marriages, deaths. That last part strikes a somber note but I was excited by all these details I was uncovering. I even went far back in my own generation game to people born in 1562.

Very thrilling.

But the other reason that I was undertaking this research, was to find the answer to the really big family mystery. We had all wondered about it for some time now.

As grandkids, we had grown up knowing that our grandfather's dad, wasn't really his dad. There had been someone else, a shadowy figure that had fathered him, and apparently, buggered off.

During my early research of a few months ago, I found the man that my great grandmother had been married to. His name was Fred, he was a fish salesman in Northampton and after marriage, he and his wife had three children. He had been in the great war, there was a record of him applying for leave, as there was financial hardship.

And then there was his death record, the year listed was 1928. A full three years before my grandfather was born.

Now, I had two stories to look at. The first was my grandfather's thought he was related to Thomas Lawrence ie "Sir Lawrence of Arabia." No sense in not checking.

As it happens - Sir Thomas Edward Lawrence was born to Sarah Lawrence and Thomas Chapman (the father's surname is part of my grandfather's full name - hence the lingering suspicion) but after their affair and later marriage, living in London, they all kept the mother's surname, not the father's. Myth - busted.