Genealogy: Prince or pauper, the truth really is out there

May 24 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

In the final part of our genealogy series, Alex Curry meets a man who uncovered some intriguing tales in the archives

RESEARCHING your family tree is a big task to take on. It’s a chance to discover your heritage, possibly uncover some family secrets and maybe even find out that you are descended from Royalty.

For Roger Spalding, senior lecturer in History at Edge Hill University, the initial idea came from a few old photographs and his own curiosity.

“My mother remarried, so my family changed. We moved away from Nottingham to Suffolk, and I just wanted to retrace my steps. I had the photographs, and I wanted to find out more about them,” he says.

With just a surname and the pictures to hand, Roger, 53, set about his task.

“I knew the name of my grandfather, which was Utting, and I knew his birth place, so I went to the National History Archives in Surrey and got his birth certificate,” he explains.

“From that, I discovered he was born in 1903, and I got the name of his mother and father.”

After tracing them, Roger visited his local newspaper library, and ploughing through the archives led him to discover a man he believed to be his grandfather’s brother.

“I cross-referenced the brother with great-great-grandparents to make sure they were related, and they were. I had to check a lot, because there were quite a few Uttings on the Census.”

Although Roger was able to access records as far back as 1801, he came across difficulties, especially because the first four censuses were based mainly on statistics, rather than any personal information.

“After the 1901 Census it’s quite easy, but before that there were situations when some people such as fisherman were away while the census was compiled. There were crew Censuses, but again it was difficult because there were lots of Uttings.

“I discovered that some of my family lived inland in farming communities.

“The problem with the Census is it doesn’t tell you why people did what they were doing.”

Along the way, Roger has found out some very interesting facts about people he is related to.

After calling for information about his family name on the internet, he was contacted by a distant relation who told him they are both related to JK Rowling.

“When I went back a generation or two, I found that some of my relatives had the address, The Beach.

“I suspect a lot of people set up home on the beach because it didn’t belong to anybody,” he reveals.

According to Roger, it was people like these ancestors who set Charles Dickens’s writing in motion.

“In David Copperfield, there is a character called Peggotty who lives in an upturned boat. Apparently, he got his inspiration from seeing people live on a beach.”

Another interesting story Roger discovered was that his great-great- grandmother was appointed village midwife, but without any qualifications.

“She had no training at all, but because she had 11 children – five sons, six daughters – that was seen as enough experience.”

Tracing his family tree wasn’t always a happy experience, adds Roger, as some of the newspapers he read in his research uncovered truly tragic tales.

He read about a young girl, this time no relation, who lived with her parents but had two illegitimate children.

When she fell pregnant with her third child, her life fell apart: “It was sort of like the straw that broke the camel’s back. Her parents threw her out and she just walked, for 10 miles, before going down onto a cold beach, giving birth and then drowning her baby in the sea,” says Roger.

“She walked to the police station and confessed. They found her guilty, but also said she was insane.”

When it comes to researching your own family tree, Roger says he can’t recommend the experience highly enough. “In Liverpool, about a third of the population are Irish, so you get a real sense of diversity, and how long different groups have been here,” he says.

“It gives you a fuller sense of your identity, especially when you discover that something happened to people directly connected to you.”