The concept of family and genealogy plays a big part in Crossed Bones. More people are starting to get interested in what their ancestors got up to, and there are a growing number of sites dedicated to tracing your family tree.

I’d had my hopes up that I might be distantly related to royalty, or someone historically famous. But unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case.

I interviewed my household’s resident ‘Nicholson Family History Expert.’

Read the interview with her below in order to find out more:

Me: So Mum, what made you decide to start work on our family tree?

Mum: Well someone else in the family had already started one. But it had a very complicated layout and was difficult to understand. I decided to try to reorganise it a bit, and got addicted from there. It’s very interesting. Like, you find someone that was a millwright, and you think “Well what was a millwright?”, so you go and find out.

Me: How far back have you managed to go with it?

Mum: (Goes to consult files)

Dad: (In background) Last Wednesday.

Mum: I go by things like birth and death certificates. They were introduced in 1837. Before that all the information comes from parish records. So christening records and things like that. But after a while they get more difficult to trace, because of the records being destroyed and that kind of thing. (Consults another file) I have the will of one Sylvester Wyatt, who was born in 1595. The will was written on the 14th October 1662 and has details about his set of silver spoons. Those didn’t get passed down to us, sadly. He was your eleven-times great grandfather.

Me: Have you come across any really interesting names?

Mum: Hmmm. There was a Hercules somewhere. And a Gabriel. Someone called Moses Money. Septimus Nicholson, who was a seventh son. Then there was Uriah Harmsworth Houghton, who was illegitimate.

Me: What names come up the most?

Mum: William. I’m fed up with that name now. And Thomas. And Mary.

Me: Have there been any remarkable stories? People with really interesting lives?

Mum: A few, yeah.

There was William James Hobart, son of the sister of your five-times great-grandfather. He was the first child of European descent born in Victoria, Australia.

David Durant, who was a notorious poacher and published a book about his exploits.

Uriah Houghton, who was born under a bush by the side of a road during a snowstorm. He was a sieve maker, and walked bent over because of an accident which left him crippled. Six of his children immigrated to Australia. One of his grandchildren, Caleb, ‘wandered away’ and was found three months later living with Aborigines.

Me: That is pretty awesome. But we’re not descended from royalty?

Mum: Unfortunately not, no.

Me: That’s a shame. So what are you going to do once you’re finished with our family tree?

Mum: I don’t think I’ll ever be finished. So far I’ve just been using the easy to find stuff: things that I can find online. After that I might go and look at parish records.

Me: Do you think future generations will do the same as you are? Do you think they’ll look for us? And do you reckon they’ll go about it differently to how you have?

Mum: Definitely, yes. But how they do it will probably be some way that we can’t imagine. I mean, I’m finding records of people from 1850. They wouldn’t have been able to imagine us now, using PCs and reading about them.

Dad: (In background) In the future there won’t be PCs. The apes will have destroyed them all.

Mum: Instead of looking at baptism and census records, future generations will be saying “Look, here’s a video of your granny on YouTube”.

Me: Hah, so true. Thanks Mum!