Yet the unexpected gruesomeness and the sad tales of family history keep us interested, maintains Churchill. There might be scandal to contend with Lynda Scholten, from Essex, was horrified when her research revealed that the husband of one of the daughters of her great-great-great-grandparents committed bigamy by marrying two further women before raping the 15-year-old daughter of his third wife. Not all our relations, however, will have led the kinds of lives uncovered on Who Do You Think You Are? Churchill warns not to expect too much and also to prepare for stories that are sad or troubling. “It’s an incredible feeling – in this period of lockdown what better way to lift your spirits?” “I guarantee once you’ve started, you will find yourself talking to people you never would have met,” he says. Hopwood DePree, an American actor and film director, discovered his family’s abandoned stately home while researching his British past on an ancestry website. No matter who you are, you will uncover fascinating stories about your forebears, says Churchill. Ancestry is so emotional, adds Hills it really touches people’s souls and their hearts. “If you like puzzles and detective trails and you’re tenacious, you’ll enjoy genealogy,” she says. It’s the stories behind the names and dates that inspire people to devote hours of their time researching long-dead family members, says Churchill. The 109-year-old Society of Genealogists, which has 7,000 members, is regularly bequeathed family archives so extensive that they arrive in lorries. Who Do You Think You Are? regularly attracts more than six million viewers, while there are more than 55 million member trees on family tracing website Ancestry’s global network. “Family history shows you that the coming and going of generations is part of the natural order,” she says.īritain is a nation of amateur genealogists, fascinated by the past. The fact we’re here, despite these past horrors, is somehow reassuring during the current pandemic, explains Else Churchill, also of the Society of Genealogists. “If the end smelt of decomposing flesh when he pulled it out, he knew there was a body to be exhumed,” he explains.
Mike Pipe, a volunteer at the Society of Genealogists, is a case in point – he discovered that his paternal great- grandfather, Charles Henry Pipe, was a grave exhumer after the First World War, pushing a stick into the ground on battlefields. “We can take comfort from our history – if Great-Uncle Fred could make it through the Western Front aged 17, you can cope with lockdown,” he says. It also feels timely to be delving into our pasts now, Cox continues there are parallels between the current uncertainty and other times when our families have endured hardship. It’s like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle but with real stories that have never been told.” “Anybody can do it – you don’t need to have an academic background. “Time is usually the biggest barrier to researching our past, but now we have more of it,” he says. It’s also a great way to connect with older relatives, says Alex Cox, of family history website Findmypast. “Genealogy is internet-based these days and a great excuse to sort through old photographs and documents,” she explains. This 500-year genealogy project would be no small undertaking but, according to Sue Hills, a former director of the BBC One show Who Do You Think You Are?, tracing family history is a perfect rainy-day pursuit for lockdown.
Over the next 150 years, the Tyzacks become wealthy glassblowers, build the Château de Lichecourt, and then, off the back of another murder, flee to England.Īccording to Don Tyzack, a distant relative who has documented the family history in a book Glass, Tools and Tyzacks, everyone with my surname originates from this insalubrious bunch – the challenge now is to trace my strand of the family back to Jehan and his father, Guillaume. The earliest Tyzack records are in eastern France on Sept 11 1490, a relation called Jehan murders a man called Martin – and gets away with it. As family histories go, the story of my father’s side, the Tyzacks, is a little mixed (my mother’s family, the Cubitts, illustrated on the cover, are more sedate).