some people are “living” their History (eg Jane)
Can we hear from others of you, who may or may not have an interesting past ??
Is anyone trying to locate their Past ???
My mum researched her family as far back as William Billingsley, who created the “Billingsley Rose” design for Spode…It would seem he’s buried in a debtor’s / pauper’s grave somewhere, possibly to escape creditors.
Her father’s family were transporters in & around Whitechapel…carters, hansom cab drivers etc…her father was a printer.
Her mother’s side would seem to be of Irish extraction, & were chippies / joiners.
Dad’s family were variously farmers from South Essex (not the rich ones), & his dad was a regular soldier who was awarded the MM ; all we know of his mum is that she came from Chelsea.
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What a mixed bag of ancestors… fascinating… 
Has the artistic flair come on down through the generations… ??
That’s not necessarily true Jane. You won’t be able to pack a bag and move when you like, you will just have to apply for visa instead and then a resident’s card in due course. And the same as at present for non-EU nationals, most countries will accept physically dependent family members as long as they can support themselves financially.
I’ve got cake!
My dads family have lived within this same area since the 1700s. My mums side is more mixed . Her mums mother came from the Cotswolds and worked as a maid at Sudley Castle,her siblings moved up to Darwen when the Gloucestershire branch of the paper mill they worked in closed ( they moved to the Lancashire branch) and she joined them when their parents died. My granddads mother was ‘done wrong by’ the son of a more wealthy family, either she or he was jewish I’ve heard mixed stories, Granddad therefore spent some of his adolescence in a boys home but not all of it
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Happy Birthday… 
Marvellous stuff… well done Nellie…
So far… none of us appears to have come from silver-spoon set… which makes us “the salt of the earth”…
Darren, Crown paints.
Lower Darren if you please Jane ,even today it’s a major distinction
One of my uncle’s traced our family history on my mother’s side back to 17th/18th century Lithuania. And from there the various miserable historic events pushed us across Europe, where my grandfather’s generation then moved to Germany. Bad move. I knew my grandfather and he was totally German, proudly fought for Germany in WWI and was taken prisioner in Paris. And then only 15 years later to have to flee for his life from the people he fought alongside.
My father’s family also left their homeland (scotland) under a different cloud in 18thC…badly behaved etc…and ended up as farmers in (then) Rhodesia. My father ended up alone back in england as a small child when his father and brother died so he was sent over to a school while his mother tried to keep up the farm.
So I have the family tendency to move countries…
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Yet again… a fascinating story…
If you think that going through all that palaaver is acceptable, I can tell you that I don’t.
We are going to take French citizenship to avoid this eventuality and to feel more part of our life here.
I can trace my family a long way back and although my mother’s family come from the east end of London I was surprised to discover that I don’t seem to be related to either Danny Dyer or Royalty
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The interesting thing about having my surname is that our family history has been mapped out pretty extensively - there are two separate trees traceable back to the 1600’s - one originating in Derbyshire and on in Nottinghamshire, I’m officially in the former.
Except that I’m not - total fraud and interloper. My great grandfather James, notionally the son of Thomas and Lucy was born 3 years after the death of Thomas - registering births was often delayed back in the 1870’s but three years is a heck of a stretch.
I was rather disappointed when I discovered this as a sense of belonging to my “tribe” evaporated.
At some point I might hunt down the 1881 census data and see if there is any clue as to who James’ father was but, unless someone moved in and replaced Thomas as head of the family permanently enough to have been captured in the census it might be impossible to do that.
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You just never know… in those way back years things were often a bit murky… you might discover that you are definitely a Flinders off of the old block… your biological ancestor may have been “one of the family”… 
Sounds delightfully Midsomerish to me… Upper this and Lower that… incidentally… I presume it is Lower Darwen (a bit like the chap Darwin, before he grew taller)…
or whatever… my spelling is gone to pot…
Lower Darwen and Darwen proper. Known to locals as Darren
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Oh dear… does this mean you come from the “improper” side of things… 
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Probably not much more murky than today - just with slightly less attention to documentation; I’m sure that behaviour vis-à-vis out of wedlock stuff hasn’t fundamentally changed. I suspect Lucy just found a new bloke to replace Thomas in her affections as he died relatively young even for the time (in his late 30’s, Lucy would have been 32) without bothering to do the getting married thing. There were two children after Thomas’s death James (my great grandfather) and John (born 5 years after James so ?? even same father).
I didn’t mean murky/nasty… just murky as in “not always clear/correct”… 
There are so many instances of a family name being misspelt… incorrect dates etc etc… can make it very difficult to track/trace… and as for “place of birth”… seems that can be almost anywhere between Mars and the Moon and all points in between : family word-of-mouth tells me one thing… but some documents point to another… 
So did I 
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