Ancestry Research

Lol, yeah, I think the interesting point he’s making is that people are no more related to their third cousins than they are to any old Tom, Dick or Harry - after all, we share 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and over 50 percent with bananas :smile:

Btw, there is an error contained within that cut and paste job I did; I tried to edit it but couldn’t because apparently I’d exceeded the character limit. An upvote for anyone who spots it!

My mum does most of the genealogy for our family, but I will probably get more into it if I ever have more time. My maternal grandfather’s family were all farmers in the Chichester area going back to the 15th century. Not that sure about other threads of the family, my paternal grandmother’s family came from Surrey and my great-great grandfather was a goldsmith (my grandmother told me that when she was a little girl he would put goldleaf on her cuts and scratches as its antiseptic), my paternal grandfather’s parents came from Newcastle (great-grandmother) and Herefordshire (great-grandfather) but met in London when they were both servants in some posh house in the West End. My last name Perkins is the Welsh version of a French name from the Norman conquest (Pierre-kin) so I guess the family is partly Welsh and French (makes sense with Herefordshire connection) but don’t think my mum has got that far back yet.

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Whoa…reviving the dead…well a dead thread anyway.
I suppose anyone who indulges in Genealogy is doing that anyway. :lou_lol:

I know a lot about my Victorian ancestors. My g g grandparents led interesting lives. Fortunately, others before me have done most of the spadework but I have, over the years, fleshed out some questions that have remained unanswered.

Genealogy can be incredibly time-consuming and at times an incredibly boring array of names and dates. I’m not a genealogists but I am a networker; I light touch papers and stand back to view results.

Earlier this week I got a great result, one of my g g grandparents’ 1833 wedding presents was found. It was a large portrait of the seventeenth century poet John Milton. I’ve known about this present for a long time, it hung in my ancestor’s bookshop in London for 40 years, but I had never seen an image of it. I didn’t know anyone who had seen it.

I had recently found a reference to this portrait; it was sold in the 1870s to a collector in the US and by the 1930s had found its way onto the walls of the New York Public Library. An online search of their website revealed no mention, although you could view their picture collections.

Time to let the hounds loose, I’m no academic but I know a few so I was hoping they had connections in the NY academic circle. It didn’t take long, online academia’s a bit like the dark web, there’s a wealth of information lurking below the surface if you have someone who can access it.

On Tuesday I had an email from a friend in the US and it had this picture attached. He contacted a friend in NY who in turn gave the name of the curator of the NY Public Library’s picture collections.

The curator, Liz, walked the corridors to find the portrait and took a picture of it for me. Something of a result, I think. :lou_lol:

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So you’re a poet and we didn’t know it?

Aspiring poet…I started out with a Sonnet but could only manage twelve lines. :frowning:

:joy:

Here’s a mildly offensive Haiku for you then:

Not thinking things through,
Lack of common sense to guide,
Stupidity grows.

:wink::joy:

I’m monosyllabic at best…
shit.

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