Explore the Family Tree and discover more about my extended family and loved ones. My aim is to help make their varied and interesting lives accessible to living relatives and other parties. Tributes can be found here to our fondly remembered parents Pam and Phil Cheshire, Alma and Ron Rollitt.
My family from Hertfordshire?
Anyone who has watched the BBC’s family history programme Who Do You Think You Are will be familiar with the emotions engendered by revelations of our ancestors’ trials and tribulations. Many tears have been shed with discoveries of the sufferings in my own Shropshire family through poverty, neglect, illness, prison, the workhouse and early deaths. Two great aunts were sent as Home Children to Canada where one of them was battered to death by person or persons unknown, but with strong suspicions hanging over her husband.
Research into the overcrowded conditions of Red Lion Yard in Berkhamsted was reminiscent of the Stews and Rookeries of my home town, Shrewsbury. Heavy drinking to alleviate the misery, brawling women, ragamuffin kids, reckless or desperate men poaching on rich men’s estates; the same stories told in towns across the land.
With the advent of DNA testing has come a new opportunity to peek beyond the “brick walls” of illegitimacy and the paucity of records. After forty years of living in Berkhamsted, studying social and local history, imagine my delight when many of the people who match my DNA are from families who appear to hail from Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire!
In 1577, Robert Halsey also known as Chambers married Ellen Barrett Alley aka Cooke (why the aliases?) in Flamstead. There was a double wedding when their son and daughter Robert and Ann married Ann and Thomas Wheeler of Cranfield. Another Halsey son Thomas married Elizabeth Phoebe Wheeler who was killed in an arson attack on settlers by Pequot Indians in 1649 in Southampton, Suffolk, New York. Their descendants thrived and their DNA matches mine.
One of these days, I hope there will be a Eureka moment when I finally discover the connection between my Shropshire ancestors and the Halseys, Putnams and Cheshires of Flamstead, Gaddesden and Edlesborough. Did my forbears tread the backstreets and alleyways of Berkhamsted?
The last of the line for my family
Three families toiling mostly on the land, all striving to survive through deprivations and wars; the children making their way in the world as best they could (two of the Cheshires forced into emigration to uncertain and frightening futures); but not a single person will carry on the branches of Cheshire, Hotchkiss or Bishop. Most of them, poor as church mice, lived in the glorious countryside of Shropshire and the borders and only a handful of descendants continue in that fair county.
I’m always thrilled to find other members of our family via this website, so continue to send pictures and anecdotes of our past and present families to add to the story!
Comments on Genealogy, by Ebenezer Burgess, 1865
“This volume is only an approximation to the truth. It asserts no claim to infallibility. Written records, public and domestic, are the best authority. But many families have no registry. The memory of the living is always fallible. Popular tradition is soon vitiated. Whatever truthfulness could be attained by industry and careful inquiry, this volume claims. Some descendants failed to make any report, and whole families are left out. In many other families, a few fragments only are inserted. That errors may be found, there can be no doubt. These pages are left open to future corrections.”
Mr Burgess evidently did not make a living from genealogy: “The genealogist must live on dry roots, prosecute his work with little sympathy from others, and deny himself the hope of any pecuniary reward.”
Travels Through Time 