Street view

Over the last couple of days, I've started work on another chapter of my maternal genealogy, concerning ancestors from Ireland. In fact, they were basically Scottish Protestants who had formed so-called "plantations" in Ulster, in order to propagate the English language and import the Protestant faith into Catholic Ireland. I'm not surprised that such transplanted folk found it an attractive idea, in the middle of the 19th century, to abandon their adopted land in Northern Ireland and move out to New South Wales. Meanwhile, during the century and a half since then, Ulster hasn't yet got over the cultural turmoil created by these British squatters who once decided to settle in the Gaelic isle.

Here's a photo of my aged great-grandfather Isaac Kennedy in my native town of South Grafton:

He was born in a plantation context in County Fermanagh in 1844, and arrived in New South Wales in 1866. This photo would have been taken in the early 1930s, not long before Isaac's death at the age of 90.

Isaac's massive gold signet ring was inherited by his grandson, my uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker. Today, my uncle—whom we've always nicknamed Bargy—lives in Coffs Harbour, where he turned 93 last January. Aware of my fondness for family history, Bargy recently passed this ring on to me.

Yesterday, while looking at the above photo of Isaac Kennedy, I started wondering where exactly in South Grafton it might have been taken. So, last night, I phoned Bargy and asked him where his grandfather used to live. Bargy's reply: "Somewhere in Spring Street." This morning, I opened Google Maps, displayed Spring Street in South Grafton, and turned on the street-view device. I imagined that, in the secluded neighborhood of Spring Street, the old Kennedy house might still exist, along with its original fence. I said to myself that there couldn't be too many old properties with a quaint white fence like that, whose palings slope up to the fence posts. Sure enough, I soon came upon an image of an old house with a fence of that kind.

I enlarged a section of the fence, and filtered it with Photoshop to examine closely the palings.

There's no doubt in my mind that this is Isaac's front fence. Besides, Google Maps indicates street numbering. So, this tool has enabled me to learn that my ancestor, a solitary widower, spent the final years of his life in a nice-looking old house at 46 Spring Street, South Grafton.

DNA test

To celebrate the birthday of Charles Darwin, I finally decided to order a DNA test. As everybody knows, the results will reveal the particular species of monkey from which I descend, and the jungle in which my ancestors lived, maybe even the kind of trees in which they built their homes. Besides that, this DNA test will no doubt confirm that I have an exceptionally high level of extremely healthy and active intelligence genes, and that I was genetically endowed to be a really superior guy from every point of view. Based upon hard facts, the test will no doubt also explain scientifically (for those who were not already aware of this particular aspect of my being) why I've always had a terrific sensual effect upon beautiful women, a little like Julio Iglesias (but without the singing) or George Clooney (without the Nescafé ads). And I'll be getting all this great information sent to my doorstep, direct from Arizona, for no more than 120 euros.

Well, the results of the test might not be quite like that. So maybe I should set aside my wishful thinking and describe the DNA test in a more modest down-to-earth way.

[Click the logo to visit the Family Tree DNA website.]

I lost no time in choosing a company to carry out my test because, in the genealogical domain, there aren't really very many companies around. The laboratories that you hear of in the news—when scientists talk, say, about cracking the genome of Neanderthals or the possibility of cloning furry mammoths—are not concerned with the DNA of ordinary mortals such as you and me. Most of the high-profile companies that advertise their high-priced services in DNA analysis are medically-oriented, which means that they're capable of obtaining personal data about your genetic makeup that might just prevent your descendants, one of these days, from purchasing life insurance, finding a partner and procreating, or even getting certain jobs. Apart from that, though, it's great to know yourself better from a health viewpoint. As far as genealogy is concerned, most people seem to agree that the Arizona-based company called Family Tree DNA is the ideal door to knock on, because they propose an infrastructure enabling you to meet up with other individuals with comparable DNA profiles.

One of the first sobering things you learn, when you step into the domain of genealogical DNA tests, is that specialists refer to the precious molecular fragments used in their analyses as junk DNA. Now, this doesn't mean that they think your ancestors are trash. Even if a living prince were to use DNA testing to confirm that he descended from a long-dead king, this would be done by means of junk DNA. The adjective "junk" simply draws attention to the curious fact (well, it's curious for newcomers) that the fragments of the DNA double helix yielding the most information as far as family links are concerned lie outside the all-important sequences of genetic coding that determine what kind of hereditary makeup we have. Between the genes, in our lengthy strand of DNA, there's a vast quantity of chemical "noise" (to borrow the term used by communications engineers), which doesn't play any role in determining our inherited nature. Well, this junk part of our DNA reveals certain patterns that remain constant from a father to his sons. These patterns get copied in the Y-chromosome, found only in males. Consequently, if the DNA of two males happens to contain identical patterns of this kind, that means that their paternal ancestral lines reach back to a unique male individual.

What does this mean at a practical level? Let me give you an example. In an article written in August 2007 entitled Dorset ancestral anecdotes [display], I mentioned an old pump organ that I discovered (and actually played) in the village of Blandford.

The label on the instrument mentioned a William Skivington, proprietor of a local music shop.

The UK census of 1861 mentions this fellow and his family, and refers to him as a piano tuner. I'm surely a relative of this individual, who lived from 1827 to 1912, but I've not yet been able to determine our exact links. Now, let's imagine an unlikely discovery. Let's suppose that, inside the organ in the Blandford folk museum, we happened to find a trace of blood that had been left there long ago when William Skivington hit his thumb with a hammer while repairing the instrument. Normally, if this fellow were indeed a distant cousin of mine, we should find that junk DNA recovered from the spot of blood in the organ has the same markers as in my own DNA test.

OK? Well, that fictitious scenario does not in fact describe the usual way in which genealogical researchers go about using the results of DNA tests. Although this approach would be theoretically sound, we don't generally go around searching in pump organs or cemeteries for specimens of the blood of our supposed ancestors. I would be more interested in coming upon a fellow who's living today, let's say a certain Fred Skivington settled over in Canada, who is convinced—through sound documentary evidence—that he is a descendant of the Dorset piano-tuner William Skivington. In such a situation, if Fred's DNA markers coincided with mine, then this would reveal that I, too, am related to the William of Blandford.

I'm obliged to admit, though, that it would be very tempting to have an opportunity of fossicking around in some of the ancient tombs over in the village of Skeffington in Leicestershire. You never know what kind of junk you might dig up there...

Portrait of Queen Victoria

From time to time, I continue to investigate (just for fun) the mysterious portrait of a young Queen Victoria, inherited by my friend Sheridan. When I last visited England, a year and a half ago, I dropped in at an arts school in the London suburb of Hampstead, known today as the Institute, which I mistook for the Hampstead Garden Suburb School of Arts and Crafts, whose former principal was Ernest Heath [1867-1945]. The director of the Institute told me that the two schools had nothing in common, and he suggested that I contact the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington concerning Sheridan's plaque. Before I could do so, I needed to set down clearly, in the form of a website, my speculations concerning the plaque. And that's what I've been doing over the last few days.

[Click the image to visit my new website.]

Before building this website and contacting the museum (which I intend to do immediately), I had to get over an amusing obstacle, in the form of a legend that arose in Sheridan's family context in Australia. According to this legend, one of Sheridan's female ancestors was an adolescent friend of Victoria, and the ceramic plaque was a personal gift to her from the queen, maybe at the time of the marriage of Victoria and Albert. To evaluate this legend, which is surely false, I was helped greatly (in a negative sense) by an excellent study of Victoria's adolescence written recently by a US professor of English from Texas, Lynne Vallone.

It's a fascinating detective exercise to examine a certain situation, constructed around a legend, in order to separate the factual wheat from the mythical chaff. In the case of Sheridan's legend about a friendship between two adolescent girls, one of whom was a commoner and the other a princess, the emerging truth would appear to be far more gratifying. My conclusions are outlined in the new website. I'm convinced that Sheridan's ancestors in London were related to a celebrated line of creators who were appointed engravers and painters to British monarchs, including Victoria. That's more interesting than having an ancestor who was merely a teenage friend or bridesmaid of the queen...

Fabulous Fanny

My blog-writing slowed down somewhat over the last week because I decided to spend a little time producing a readable presentation of the genealogy of my compatriot friend Sheridan Henty, whose ancestors came from Surrey and Kent.

[Click the image to access my work on the Heaths.]

A year or so ago, Sheridan gave me a copy of an old family tree, and I've been aware that, if I didn't document it correctly, it was likely to disappear, which would be a pity.

Amusing anecdote. The family tree states that an 18th-century fellow named William Heath was a gambler and a spendthrift, who ended up squandering all the inherited possessions of the ancient family. It then says that he married a girl named Fanny Seymour, a niece of the Marquess of Hertford. Now, that tale intrigued me, because marquesses are rare creatures in the English peerage, and I couldn't understand how a chap like William could have won the hand of a noble woman named Seymour, descendant of the 1st Duke of Somerset, brother of Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII. I felt that there had to be a hitch somewhere, so I set out on a quest to identify William's beloved Fanny.

I soon found a woman who matched the given description: a certain Anne Seymour [1748-1828], niece of the 1st Marquess. More than a dozen years older than William, she had married a nobleman named John Damer. After seven years of an unhappy marriage, her husband blew his brains out with a pistol in Covent Garden. Left to her own resources, his widow soon became a celebrated sculptor. She is known, in particular, for a marble bust of her friend Horatio Nelson. Her bronze bust of the great English naturalist Joseph Banks, who accompanied James Cook to Australia, is particularly imposing.

Anne Seymour Damer (as she is generally called today) studied under the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Cerrachi, who produced a life-sized marble statue (housed today in the British Museum) of his young pupil, attired in ancient robes.

Anne's closest confident was the effeminate Earl of Oxford, Horace Walpole, ten years younger than her. She was never the wife of William Heath. Besides, it appears that Anne preferred female partners. In any case, she was no doubt capable of infatuating her young admirer, and helping him spend what remained of his fortune.

Why, I wondered, would William have called his friend Fanny, rather than Anne? This morning, I discovered that a popular novel had been published when William was 9 years old. Although the story was in no way connected with Anne Seymour Damer, it probably enabled William Heath to fantasize.

Poor William! Not only was he carried away by a noble lesbian widow who surely preferred the cold touch of marble and bronze to the caresses of her young admirer. He had fallen in love with the heroine of a Georgian novel!

Birthday offering

For French Catholics, November 2 is the Day of the Dead. People visit cemeteries and place flowers on the tombs. Within our tiny family, November 2 is quite the opposite. It's the birthday of Emmanuelle.

Last night on TV, I watched the Elizabeth I movie: the 2005 creation with Helen Mirren as the queen, which preceded the production on the same subject starring Cate Blanchett.

I found it moving... and I'll be looking forward, one of these lazy days, to seeing the more recent version of this famous epoch. [It's hard for an ordinary viewer to keep up with all the royal stuff that's coming out.]

Inspired by the movie, and before slipping off to sleep, I browsed through my familiar Kings and Queens of England by Antonia Fraser to check up on the background information concerning the Virgin Queen's passion for her "Robin", Lord Leicester. In the context of descriptions of suitors for the queen's hand, I was promptly alerted by a phrase that had escaped me during my past readings:

Another English candidate was Sir William Pickering, a diplomat...

I was startled in that I have a paternal ancestor named William Pickering [1843-1914]: an Oxford-trained surveyor who designed the future city of Auckland in New Zealand. When I was a child in Grafton, my grandmother had often talked to me with pride about her father, from whom I derived my Christian name.

This afternoon, I took out my folder of Pickering files, which has been full of genealogical holes since the beginning of my research, a quarter of a century ago. For reasons I can't explain, this Pickering line is the last genealogical vector that I've got around to exploring seriously... although I've often imagined it vaguely as maybe the richest source in my genetic makeup.

In spite of all my research in this domain, I've rarely felt that I "relate" deeply to the Skyvington lineage from Dorset [display], and less so to the confused Irish context on my mother's side [display]. But I've often experienced a gut-level certitude that I'm a chip off the genetic block of my paternal grandmother Kathleen Pickering.

After a strenuous and marvelous afternoon of in-depth research on the web, I finally succeeded amazingly in filling in all the genealogical gaps on the Pickering side of my ancestry, enabling me to get back directly, in a remarkably short line, to my 16th-century ancestor Nicolas Wadham, founder of the college that bears his name at the University of Oxford. And this lineage passes alongside a celebrated personage: Jane Seymour, the second wife of Henry VIII, father of the heroine of the movie I was watching on French TV last night. Basically, my family history moves from Wadham to Martyn, then on to Latton and finally Pickering.

So, here is my birthday gift to my daughter: an image of the ancient arms of a major branch of her English ancestors, the Wadhams.

Needless to say, I intend to put all this newfound stuff into clear writing as soon as possible.

Family history writing

Maybe certain friends who read my Antipodes blog are interested in Grafton, which was my birthplace. In my monograph on my maternal genealogy entitled A Little Bit of Irish, I've just completed and uploaded chapter 4, concerning my maternal ancestors in Grafton named Kearney, O'Keefe and Dixon. After clicking the cover image, click MENU then request the downloading of the PDF file for chapter 4. It's quite bulky (10 megabytes), so don't try to download anything unless you've got a broadband Internet connection.

Once you've downloaded the file, it's preferable to read it on the screen of your computer, rather than printing out some or all of the 53 pages on a color printer, since you can use the enlarge feature of your PDF reader to zoom in on photos, etc.

Chapters 2 and 3 of my monograph deal with an earlier and more exciting dimension of my maternal genealogy: the Walker and Hickey branches in Braidwood, at the time of the gold rush and bushrangers.

The title of my monograph is slightly ironic in that I no longer believe that our pioneering ancestor Charles Walker [1807-1860] was really a Catholic Irishman from Cork, as he made himself out to be, but rather a Protestant Scotsman, maybe even [according to a family legend that is old enough to be taken seriously] a brother of the fellow who invented Scotch whisky. I find it hard to imagine that the owners of the Caroline—a Newcastle banker, William Chapman, and a man from Calcutta, Eliot MacNaughten—would have hired an Irishman from Cork, in 1833, as the steward aboard a vessel carrying the families of convicts to New South Wales. Besides, nobody has ever found the least trace of our ancestor's alleged birth and life in Ireland. I have the impression that, once settled as the owner of a sheep grazing property in a largely Irish area of the Braidwood region, called Irish Corner, my ancestor simply lied about his nationality and religion in order to wed a 16-year-old Irish Catholic girl, daughter of a transported convict.

Today, many of the Australian descendants of Charles Walker are devout Catholics. I've invented a joke on this theme. I can imagine making the above allegations in front of one of these Catholic descendants, and concluding as follows: "So, you see, your supposedly Irish Catholic ancestor may well have been a Scottish Protestant." Reaction of the Catholic Walker descendant: "I've always known that Scottish Protestants are lying bastards."

Places and people named Beaufort

In France, at least a dozen towns or villages are called Beaufort. Literally, Beaufort means "beautiful fortress", and there was a time when France was studded with countless fortifications. So, it's not surprising that this name has survived, often associated with an ancient castle.

This weekend, representatives from many of these places named Beaufort were gathered together, a little like members of an international clan, in the tiny village of Beaufort in the Isère department, an hour's drive away from my homeplace. It's a superficial but amusing pretext for an international gathering, a little like the twinning concept. In a dynamic little community, like that of Beaufort in Isère, local citizens house the visitors in their homes, which makes the whole process simple and friendly. Meanwhile, the gathering is a platform for touristic promotion of the various Beaufort places.

The French name has been widely exported. There's a Beaufort Castle in Scotland, in Luxembourg and even in Lebanon. Towns named Beaufort exist in the USA (South Carolina) and in Australia (Victoria).

Yesterday afternoon, some groups of representatives organized stalls with specimens of their local products.

As for the Australian delegates, who brought along piles of photos and leaflets concerning their town, they got interviewed on regional TV. They told me that they had been inundated, since their arrival in France, by questions from French people about tourism in Australia.

Now, why would I personally be interested in places named Beaufort?

Well, in the course of my genealogical research concerning the Skeffington family, I discovered an ancestral line that descends from John of Gaunt and his children named Beaufort. [Click the image to download an article on the genealogy of Lewis Carroll.] The four children were so named after a castle in France where they were born.

In what part of France was this Beaufort Castle located? Most English-speaking authorities [Dictionary of National Biography, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia, etc] indicate that it was in the Anjou region of western France, in the village now known as Beaufort en Vallée [see the photo of their stand, earlier on in this post]. This sounds like a reasonable suggestion, in that there were ancient links between English royalty and this region through Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou [1113-1151], patriarch of the Angevin dynasty, between the Normans and the Plantagenets. In fact, two centuries later, the Beaufort Castle associated with John of Gaunt had nothing to do with Anjou, for it was located in a quite different part of eastern France, in the tiny village of Champagne now known as Montmorency-Beaufort, whose representatives were also present at the gathering this weekend.

It's really quite remarkable that such a geographical error should continue to exist in the context of British royalty, which is surely one of the most highly-documented domains in the history of the English-speaking world. Maybe this error persists for the simple reason that the provincial facts would appear to be written, for the moment, solely in French. [I intend to publish an article on this question in the near future.]

Before leaving the festivities at Beaufort yesterday afternoon, I took this photo of a charming old stone house on the outskirts of the village.

Uninhabited for a century, this was the birthplace of Joseph Vacher [1869-1898], often referred to as France's Jack the Ripper, a notorious serial killer who was no doubt responsible for more than two dozen heinous cases of rape and murder.

As far as I know, the visitors at the Beaufort gathering were not taken on a touristic visit to this house.

Gene business

In the fascinating domain of modern genetics, one of the most exciting activities costs next to nothing. I'm referring to the possibility of purchasing and reading a few books on this subject by Richard Dawkins. But other interesting branches of the gene business can be far more costly.

Apart from the fact that they are both celebrated scientists in the field of genetics, what do these two men have in common? Well, they are among the rare human beings whose personal genomes have been totally mapped.

Several US companies are now offering services in this domain, but the fees are rather high. [Click any of the following company logos to visit their websites.] If I understand correctly, it suffices to send them a sealed tube of your saliva.

The Knome company in Massachusetts offers you the same treatment as for the above-mentioned scientists: that's to say, your entire genome will be sequenced, analyzed and interpreted. But the job will set you back a third of a million dollars.

The services offered by Navigenics, 23andMe and deCODE are far simpler.


They are cheaper, too, starting around the thousand bucks level. Navigenics and 23andMe are located in California, whereas deCODE is based in Iceland.


In all cases, the results are supposed to provide you with interesting data about potential health problems caused by the inheritance of dubious genes. In certain cases, you might be able to compare your genetic profile with that of friends and relatives, and maybe acquire genealogical information.

At the low end of the scale, for a few hundred dollars, you can send a saliva sample to the so-called DNA Ancestry Project, but I'm not sure that you can necessarily expect rewarding results.

The ideal approach to the question of the likelihood of inherited health problems still consists of compiling family health data, such as the causes of death indicated on death records. And it's hard to see how DNA analysis could provide us with more meaningful facts than those obtained through conventional genealogical research.

Personally, I'll no doubt take a closer look at the DNA Ancestry Project, in the hope of obtaining enlightenment, if possible, on a genealogical question that has always intrigued me. My maternal background was marked by a striking marriage between a respectable and industrious man, probably Scottish, named Charles Walker [1807-1860] and a younger Irish girl, Ann Hickey [1822-1898], whose father and at least one brother were notorious criminals. [Click here to visit a website about these ancestors.] I've often wondered whether it might be possible, today, to determine how their respective genes were allocated to various descendants, including myself. Sometimes, I end up thinking that I might have received a disproportionately large dose of bad Hickey genes, making me rather different to more respectable relatives with nice Walker genes. Or vice versa. But this reasoning could well be bad science. Rather than a question of bad genes.

AFTERTHOUGHT It would be fitting that my relatives might have their word to say on this fundamental question... but I'm not at all sure that they read Antipodes, and I'm even less certain that these dear folk (who didn't even wish to help me obtain retirement benefits from the supposedly-rich Australian government) might like to get involved in DNA analysis. At times, I feel that I should put a practical cross on my Australian past. Since my French naturalization, I see sadly that this is actually happening.

Links to Lewis Carroll

I'm delighted to discover that my article on the maternal genealogy of Lewis Carroll [1832-1898], author of Alice in Wonderland, incorporating results of my ongoing research into Skeffington genealogy [download PDF file], is referenced in the official website of the prestigious Lewis Carroll Society:


I hasten to point out [for readers who might be tempted to jump to wrong conclusions] that I am not related personally to either Lewis Carroll or his Skeffington family that ascends to the Plantagenet monarchs. The current state of my personal family-history research suggests that my Skyvington ancestors branched away from the patriarchal Leicestershire Skeffington line at an early date, well before these ramifications involving Skeffington folk in Ireland and subsequent marriage links with British royalty. I'm constantly motivated by the challenge of identifying a primordial Skyvington patriarch—linked to individuals named Simon de Scheftinton, or John de Skefynton, or maybe even Odo de Scevington—relatively close to the epoch of William the Conqueror. Like Carroll's personages, these legendary ancestors all lie on the other side of the looking glass, and I don't really expect to ever find them one day. But it's fun to search for shadows.

Links through images

Back on 25 March 2007, in an article entitled Half the local Aussie population is leaving! [display], I described the departure from the nearby village of Pont-en-Royans of an Australian expatriate friend named Sheridan Henty, who is a direct descendant of the celebrated Australian pioneers known as the Henty brothers. When I was in London last August, I went along to both Sotheby's and Bonhams to seek information concerning Sheridan's ceramic plaque with a portrait of the young Queen Victoria. Experts pointed out that my closeup photos of the object reveal that, for a miniature painting, it is rather crudely executed in certain places, as if the painter were not particularly skilled in this art form, or as if he had not in fact finished his painting job. This imperfect craftsmanship, combined with the fact that the portrait is unsigned, means that the commercial value of the plaque on the art market is next to nothing... which is a pity in the sense that it's a delightful portrait.

My attempts to discover the origins of this portrait caused me to look closely into the genealogy of Sheridan's Heath ancestors in England. One of her key ancestors was a wealthy shipping merchant, Miles Heath [1710-1777], who built a town house in the Strand, London, named Three Cocks Court. Sheridan has a plate bearing her ancestor's arms.

At the top, above a plate-armor helmet, a stubby round tower has erupted in flames. Inside the shield, there are three cocks. This ancient coat of arms originated in the context of a 16th-century Kentish ancestor named Henry Crow.

When carrying out genealogical research concerning a common name such as Heath, one encounters individuals who, at first sight, appear to lie outside the researcher's domain.

One such person was a baronet, Sir James Heath [1852-1942], of whom I know little. His bookplate [an image on paper, to be glued in books] appears to contain a few of the same elements as in the earlier coat of arms [except for the flames]. This makes me wonder whether James Heath might be a descendant, like Sheridan, of Miles Heath. In any case, this is a line of research I intend to pursue.

If such a link were to be established, this would make Sheridan a distant relative, through marriage, of a celebrated British dynasty that I've heard about ever since I was child: the Fitzroy family, whose chiefs have been for centuries the dukes of Grafton. Indeed, it was Sir Charles Fitzroy [1796-1858], governor of New South Wales, who in 1851 gave the name of his late grandfather, Augustus Henry Fitzroy [1735-1811], the 3rd Duke of Grafton and a former British prime minister, to the country town in New South Wales in which I would be born, nearly a century later.

In 1918, Hylda Madeleine Heath, the daughter of Sir James Heath, married Major Cecil Robert Bates [builder of the Cunard and White Star shipping lines], and their son, Sir Geoffrey Voltelin Bates, in 1957, married into the Fitzroy clan.

Whenever I phone up Sheridan to tell her such stuff, akin to family gossip, I get the impression that I bring a little sunshine into her life.

Midland ancestors

My Norman ancestors, arriving in England in 1066 with William the Conqueror, settled at the Saxon site of Sceaftinga tûn, the place of Sceaft's people, which became the village of Skeffington in Leicestershire. A few centuries later, a branch of their descendants became celebrated as Tudor lords, one of whom was in charge of Ireland. And that main branch of the family, after settling in Northern Ireland, has been headed by Viscount Massereene.

I now believe that my Skyvington/Skivington branch of the family was formed shortly before the epoch of the Tudor Skeffington lords. My ancestors were probably farmers, in Bedfordshire, where they spelt their family name with a "v" instead of "ff": Skevington. Consequently, during my recent rapid excursion to England, I decided at the last minute to visit Bedfordshire rather than the Leicestershire village of Skeffington. The departure station was St Pancras, which is being vastly modernized so that Eurostar trains will terminate here, in the heart of London, from next November.

I arrived in the charming city of Bedford on Wednesday afternoon, 1 August 2007, and booked into a modern hotel in a tall building on the far side of the bridge over the River Great Ouse.

In the center of the city, I came upon a statue with a familiar name.

The busy town markets were closing, so it wouldn't have been possible for me to buy a bouquet of flowers to place at the foot of the pedestal.

Early the next morning, I took a bus to the village of Turvey, about a dozen kilometers to the west of Bedford, which is one of a cluster of half-a-dozen villages, near the border between Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, where there was a presence of Skevington people, recorded in the archives, from as far back as the early 16th century.

The splendid old parish church is located in the center of the village.

In the genealogical domain, I'm particularly interested in a Turvey man described in the Mormon archives as George husbandman Skevington [1562-1608], younger brother of Thomas yeoman Skevington [1560-1615]. At that epoch, well before the appearance of the Hanoverian monarchs named George, this was a relatively uncommon firstname, inspired no doubt by the legendary saint of that name. Well, my earliest Dorset ancestor was a George Skivington [1670-1711], and I've often imagined that these two Georges might be linked. There are tombstones all around the church, but time and the elements have rendered them faceless.

On a wall inside the church, there's a map of around 1785 which indicates the property of a William Skevington.

This William Skevington [1734-1784] is indeed mentioned in the Mormon archives, along with his wife Elizabeth Skevington [1736-1770]. At that same epoch, just a few kilometers away from Turvey, in the Buckinghamshire villages of Lavendon and Cold Brayfield, the Mormon archives reveal the presence of individuals who actually spelt their name as Skyvington, like me, whereas in Bedford itself, others had got around to using the Skivington spelling. Consequently, there are strong reasons to believe that this corner of the Midlands—often designated by a nice expression: the Home Counties—might have been our ancestral home place prior to the Dorset phase.

Inside the church, there are several tombs of members of the 15th-century noble family named Mordaunt.

It is sobering to compare these magnificent alabaster effigies of these local lords and ladies, in a perfect state of conservation, with the faceless tombstones outside. But neither alabaster nor stone are as permanent for posterity, of course, as data of the kind stored in the computerized Mormon archives... or ordinary words of the kind I am writing now.

Dorset ancestral anecdotes

On Thursday afternoon, 2 August 2007, I took the train from London Waterloo to Poole [Dorset]. I'm surely not the first traveler to point out that British trains are old-fashioned and uncomfortable, but the emotional thrill of moving towards my ancestral Dorset negated both the physical discomfort and the constantly-repeated idiotic train messages: "Passengers are informed that, to travel on this train, they must have a ticket. If not, they may be penalized by our inspectors."

To be truthful, I spent a good part of the journey admiring the intense beauty of a veiled Moslem girl on the other side of the aisle, who was constantly consulting a portable computer, taking phone calls and listening to an Apple iPod. I was intrigued by the way she would brush aside delicately her Moslem veil in order to insert or remove an earplug. Indeed, her whole vestimentary interdiction, in counterpoint with her exquisite physical features and modernity, made this girl terribly beautiful and desirable. [Those spontaneous sentiments should be enough to earn me a fatwah from the Finsbury Park fools in London.]

After a night in a charming bed-and-breakfast on the remote north-eastern side of Poole Park Lake, far from the city [an error due to my haste in Internet booking, without the necessary examination of maps], I took a bus to the northern Dorset village of Blandford.

In a British double-decker bus on such a country road, you are hurtled through a sort of rectangular tunnel cut through the trees. You have an ideal chance of realizing that today's roads are simply an extension of yesterday's tracks. There's no such thing as a municipal no-man's-land between the road and the adjoining properties. Here in France, a motorist on a country road can usually pull over for a piss, or any reason whatsoever. This would be unthinkable in the English environment I'm describing. Sometimes I conclude that this is why many English drivers have superb new vehicles [not necessarily made in the UK]. It would be suicidal to set forth on an English road with an old vehicle that might have hiccups along the way. In certain places, it would take a helicopter to drag a stalled automobile out of the way. To put it bluntly, southern England is a travelers' nightmare. I knew that already, a quarter of a century ago, when I wrote my guidebook on Great Britain. If you're thinking of visiting this part of England, the only common-sense way of doing things consists of renting a small automobile and establishing a tightly-planned hotel schedule.

In Blandford, I stumbled upon a museum:

Inside, an old pump-organ caught my attention:

Its label had a familiar name, of the Blandford music store that sold this instrument:

The museum curator showed me publicity concerning the Skivington music shop in Blandford:

Then he invited me to play the old organ. This demanded a lot of effort, because the "lungs" of the antiquated organ were no doubt leaking, and I had to pedal like hell to produce the least sound. Still, it was an emotional performance, which seemed to move the Blandford curator, who immediately started to inundate me with copies of old documents about local Skivingtons. If I can say so, without appearing to be pretentious, I already knew more about this subject than the curator did, and he was thrilled to receive my gift of the pile of printed pages on Dorset Skivingtons that I had brought with me.

Finally, I hardly surprised the Blandford curator by pointing out to him that we Dorset Skyvingtons were issued from ancestors named Rose:

Thereupon, it was the curator who surprised me by indicating an amazing fact. He informed me that my ancestral Blandford relatives Thomas Rose [1749-1833] and his wife Jane Topp [1757-1827] were in fact the first free settlers to arrive in Port Jackson, New South Wales, aboard the Bellona, on 15 January 1793. In the heart of Dorset, on a warm day of August 2007, that fragment of information made me feel rightly more Aussie than ever.