Jacey's Family History Pages

When I was about four or five my Grandma gave me three old sepia photographs on stiff board. Two were obviously a matching pair, him and her, and the other was of a couple. The matching pair (left and right) were my grandma's parents, James Alfred Shaw and his wife, Emma Crow (or Crowe: no one has ever been able to agree a spelling). The other photo (below) was of Emma Crow's parents, George Crow and his wife Eliza Lindley. My Grandma was an admirable woman in many ways, but as with many of her generation old stuff was not considered valuable or meaningful. To give a four year old child something so irreplaceable was tantamount to throwing it away (and indeed there was a large photo of James Alfred on the wall in her back bedroom which did get thrown away when my grandparents moved house).

Somehow, however, even at the age of four, I knew how precious these images were and so I didn't scribble all over them, decorate them with jammy fingers, or take them outside in the rain... and some twenty years later I still had them safe and sound. They became the starting point for the gathering of family information. I let it be known that I was searching for old family photos and in the late 1970s, a year or two after my Gran and Grandpa died, I was given copies of their wedding photos. It was the first time I'd ever seen them. Oh how I wish I could have sat down and talked about their memories of that day with either Grandma or Grandpa.

I've always been interested in family history but never had the time of the resources to do much solid research. Pre-internet it meant days in dusty records offices and libraries and even though I'm an ex-librarian, somehow I never had the time or the inclination.

Then my Auntie Bessie was diagnosed with cancer. Bessie was not actually my aunt, but my dad's cousin from Allerton Bywater, Castleford. Dad was gone by this time (and I'd never taled about family history with him) and Bessie had never married, so for the few weeks of her final illness I visited her several times both at home and in hospital. The family semi-joke was that Bessie had once researched her family history (my paternal grandmother's family) and had traced them back to Cornwall in the 1600s where the family split into two distinct lines, one pirates and the other lunatics - and that was where she stopped. And indeed Bessie seemed keen to tell me about the family and kept drumming it in to me that Benjamin James Randle Fletcher had married Emily Robinson and that the grandfather clock which my dad had restored for her before he died (and which now belongs to me) was a wedding present to the couple from Emily's father, Sam Robinson, a colliery 'viewer' and later the landlord of the Victoria pub in Castleford and apparently a man of some substance and standing in the community.

Bessie's illness progressed quite rapidly and she died before we finished exploring the family histories. When I helped to clear her house after her death I expected to find the family research she'd done, but there was nothing except a box of photographs that asked more questions than it answered. My Auntie Dee is now approaching 90 and helped to identify some photos, but others are still unidentified to this day, though one Victorian wedding photograph in partcular bears a striking resemblance to both Dee and her daughter - my cousin Nicky.

So I had some interesting threads, but nothing concrete.

With the advent of the internet suddenly research became a whole lot easier and I decided to put together a family history for my kids, G and J, who were by this time both in university. I wanted to make sure that as far as I knew it, that family history was passed on. Because it was for the next generation, I doubled the workload instantly by deciding to do Brian's family as well as mine. I never dreamed, when I began, that I would get more than four or five or if I was very lucky six generations back, but with the help of long-lost relatives I didn't know I had (thanks to you all) I've gone back 14 generations on some lines - back to 1600 when an elderly Queen Bess still ruled and Shakespeare's plays were cutting edge contemporary drama..

Here's a generations chart which just shows ancestors. I have many many additional siblings along each generational file on my main gedcom file, but it's too complex to show on a single page.

I've tried to collect as many photos as I can - in several cases going back five generations. Here's the gallery page, but many of the photos have been interspersed in the text, too. If you've stumbled on this by chance and you're a long-lost relative you're welcome to hi-res copies of the photos, just email me. And if you happen to have a photo of my paternal grandfather, (Clifford Lockyer, 1899 - 1955, Castleford, Yorkshire) I would be delighted to see it.