Family-history shock

For the last 24 hours, I've been trying to analyze a surprising item of genealogical information that dropped out of the blue when I was playing around with the web in order to clarify some London data. I noticed that the Central Criminal Court of England has a good online website providing information on old court cases (up to 1913). Almost out of fun, I wondered what might come up if I used my own surname as a search argument. Here's what I got:

Now I definitely hadn't planned on this, because I'd always considered naively that my paternal line consisted of God-fearing law-abiding English citizens. And who was this 26-year-old William Skyvington condemned to six months' hard labor (no doubt in the notorious Newgate Prison) for fraud? I compared the details with my archives. Shit, it was my great-grandfather! Through the few facts I'd obtained about him, I'd always held him in high esteem. How on earth could he have been tempted to turn to crime?

The archaic courtroom of the Old Bailey looked something like this when William Skyvington was tried:

The prison (demolished in 1902) was located alongside the Old Bailey:

It was a place of terror. Up until 1868, public hangings were carried out in front of Newgate Prison, and Londoners paid big sums of money to watch the spectacles from neighborhood windows. Inside the overcrowded prison, once described by Henry Fielding as a "prototype of hell", lack of ventilation and hygiene brought about the death of countless inmates. Charles Dickens was fascinated by this foul place, and wrote of it in Barnaby Rudge, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations.

Here is a photo of William Skyvington with his wife Eliza Mepham and their son Ernest, my future grandfather:

I've found a lot of basic facts concerning this William Skyvington, up until about the time that this photo was taken, around 1892. But he then disappears from the scene, and we know nothing more about him. In particular, I've never succeeded in finding his death certificate. So, when I learned yesterday that he had been thrown into prison in 1898, I immediately imagined that he had probably died a miserable stealthy death at Newgate. That idea started off a chain of reflections in my mind and, by the end of the evening, I had ended up—through a purely cerebral activity of reasoning—with a rich set of plausible speculations… which I shall now outline.

First, if he had indeed died in prison, then it was very strange that the authorities had made no record of that death. In my Australian research concerning convicts and bushrangers, I discovered that individuals in these categories are among the most highly documented folk you could imagine, for obvious reasons. So, I soon concluded that it was unthinkable that William Skyvington might have died during his short stay at Newgate without leaving behind a death certificate.

Next, the aspect of this crime and imprisonment that annoyed me the most was the fact that my grandfather in Australia had never, at any moment, told us that his father had run into trouble of this kind. Why had he decided to keep this sad affair secret? Little by little, I found this idea, not only annoying, but frankly unlikely. If my grandfather had never told us about the imprisonment of his father, the most likely reason was that he himself had never been aware of this event. In other words, when he arrived in Australia as an adolescent in 1908, not only had my future grandfather lost his mother to tuberculosis, but he was no doubt totally unaware of events in the life of his father, including the fact that he had been in prison. At that moment, an important question jumped into my mind. Could William Skyvington have in fact abandoned his son, and established another family, with a new wife?

No sooner had I asked that question than I searched through my archives (collected over a quarter of a century) looking for an individual with a similar name and age, but associated with a new wife and family. Sure enough, I soon came upon such a situation… down in Cornwall, far away from London. Everything started to fall into place rapidly and convincingly. By the end of the evening, I was convinced that I had discovered, for my great-grandfather, a plausible "second life"… which he had probably started to lead straight after his release from prison.

It will take me a while to obtain all the necessary records, to confirm my speculations. But I'm sure I'm on the right path.

In other words, just as I was shocked yesterday to learn that William Skyvington had been a criminal, he too might well have been sufficiently shocked by that experience to abandon his son and start out on an entirely new life. In fact, the word "abandon" must be relativized, in that Ernest Skyvington had been cared for perfectly by his late mother's Mepham family, with whom he remained in contact after he settled in the Antipodes. But he reached Australia as if he were the last of the Skyvingtons. And everybody tended to believe him. As of yesterday, for the first time ever, I'm convinced that this was not the case. Both his father and his Skyvington grandfather were surely still living in southern England.

Hats

My sister Susan sent me this photo that she has just discovered in Mullumbimby, in northern New South Wales, where she now lives.

It shows members of the Mullumbimby Agricultural Society Committee of 1909. In the middle of the front row, the man with a white beard is Patrick Walker [1845-1941]. He was a brother of our great-grandfather Charles Walker [1851-1918]. They were both born in the notorious gold and bushranger territory of Braidwood, and this is the first photo I've ever seen of any relative of that generation.

Beneath the photo, a caption identifies all 27 men in the photo. It provides us, too, with the names of three committee members who happened to be absent when this photo was taken. To my mind, that could be a trivial lie. Those three fellows weren't really absent. The truth of the matter is that they weren't allowed to participate in the photo because they dared to turn up without hats.

Bye Bargy

My uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker—known variously as "Farmer", "Ken" or "Bargy" (baby talk for the word baby)—was the last male of the branch of the Braidwood Walkers who settled on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales.

I was in regular phone contact with him over the last few years, but his degraded hearing made it hard to communicate.

I received from my dear uncle Bargy, a few years ago, a signet ring that belonged to our Irish ancestor Isaac Kennedy [1844-1934]. On that occasion, I promised my uncle that I would do my best to perpetuate the memory of our Irish ancestors named Kennedy. Today, I repeat solemnly that pledge.

See my blog and website concerning my maternal ancestors.

I'm sad that Bargy has left us (at an advanced age), because he was one of my primary links with the past, and I had imagined that I might meet up with him again, one of these days, out in Australia.

Bye Bargy...

Sea change

Up until the age of sixteen, I was an adolescent in a dull Australian place named Grafton, where the Good Lord surely intended that nothing unusual should ever happen, not even my birth. In my time, this magnificent landscape had sadly lost its pioneering soul before losing forever its spirit of social evolution and economic development. Today, Grafton is a charming empty carcass, whose sole awareness is the fact that it's a boring old town, with nothing to say nor even hide.

Downstream, at the estuary of the Clarence River, our outlet on the Pacific Ocean was named Yamba. In 1954, surrounded by school friends, I found it an enthralling place.

My most moving recollection of Yamba dates from the summer of 1957. I had returned to Grafton after a year at the University of Sydney, and my parents had decided kindly to take me on an excursion down to Yamba... which I had not visited for quite some time. I remember, as if it were yesterday, that my father Bill Skyvington had parked his LandRover while Kath was buying food down in the new shopping area of Yamba. I was exploding internally with the urge to tell my father that, during my first year in Sydney, I had just encountered a fabulous corpus of knowledge about the nature of the world. I can even recall the slim volume of relativity physics that had engendered my enthusiasm. In a backstreet of Yamba, on that sunny afternoon, I tried naively to transmit an iota of my enthusiasm to my father. He looked at me as if I were a Martian, and informed me abruptly that he had no time for such nonsense... which was vastly less urgent, in his mind, than the question of earning one's living by grazing and slaughtering beef cattle (my father's business). By the time my mother returned from her shopping, I had lost forever all possible intellectual intimacy with my paternal progenitor. In an instant of incomprehension between a father and his son, on that sunny Yamba afternoon, I moved forever away from my ancestral ignorance... into enlightenment.

In my mind, Yamba remained nevertheless a seaside sanctuary, which my children were able to encounter briefly with joy during their teens.

Today, I learn sadly from the Australian media that something seems to have gone wrong at Yamba [display]. Is it just Yamba, I ask innocently, or Australia at large?

Nativity rites

Jean Sarkozy, the president's son, married his adolescent sweetheart, Jessica Sebaoun-Darty. The following photo shows the father and the son, accompanied by their respective wives.

A son, Solal, was born to Jessica and Jean on 13 January 2010. A few days ago, I saw in the press that the baby was subjected to the Jewish tradition of circumcision, which I find archaic and physically revolting. The Christian rite of baptism is less bloody, but just as stupid today, at the start of the third millennium. In both cases, an innocent child is being enthroned as a member of an elite body of religious believers, and this membership is being established solemnly at a time when the tiny creature at the heart of the ceremony is not yet capable of any degree of intellectual discernment. What utter nonsense, perpetrated by mindless adults!

In a recent article entitled Little gods [display], I mentioned my reading a book by the great atheist author Christopher Hitchens. On the question of circumcision, I was moved by the parts of that book in which Hitchens condemns "child abuse" in the form of "sexual mutilation". He even gives us the gory details of the way in which circumcision has been performed, as recently as 2005 in New York, by certain Hasidic fundamentalist foreskin-removers. Nasty stuff!

I predict a day in the not-too-distant future when a joyful nativity rite of a new non-religious kind will become, as it were, standard practice. The DNA of the newly-born individual will be examined and stored permanently (as permanently as possible) in a great database of the kind that would bring joy to the heart of a Mormon genealogist. And this rite would symbolize (literally, you might say, since the DNA sample is in fact a huge set of symbols) the baby's passage into the great planetary congregation of humanity.

For the moment, those who come closest to this nativity rite are the researchers in genealogy who get their DNA tested (like me). But it remains a relatively superficial affair, since only the Y-chromosome of males and the mitochondrial DNA of females are in fact examined. And it's a private firm that holds on to the DNA samples. So, I can't really count upon the hope—if ever that were my intention (which it isn't)—of my being cloned at some future time.

No sooner had I finished writing this article than I came upon a CNN story [click the baby photo to display it] indicating that US babies appear to have their DNA tested systematically, with medical reasons in mind... much to the distress of certain parents.

Insofar as humans seem to like ceremonies based upon rites of passage of various kinds (birth, marriage, death, etc), I can well imagine creative Americans (the sort of people who have transformed Halloween into a planetary event) who would find ways of transforming the baby's DNA test into a kind of celebration, with music, food and drinks, solemn speeches and even short readings from the books of Dawkins, performed by students of genetics. This new nativity rite could be called DNAtion (rhymes with creation, confirmation and ordination).

Irish ancestors

This little American girl, Ann Dunham [1942-1995], had an ancestor named Mary Kearney.










Meanwhile, this little Aussie girl, Kathleen Walker [1918-2003], also had an ancestor named Mary Kearney. However the two Marys belonged to different generations, separated by half a century.

Jumping back in time to the end of the 18th century, we find that the Kearney ancestors of both girls were Irish. Ann Dunham had an ancestor Joseph Kearney, born around 1794 in Co Offaly (province of Leinster). One of Kathleen Walker's ancestors was a Michael Kearney, born around 1785, probably in nearby Co Clare (province of Munster). Admittedly, Kearney is not an unusual surname in Ireland. Nevertheless, with a minimum of speculation (which remains an essential ingredient in genealogical research), one could well imagine that these Kearney males were cousins, if not brothers.

Let's jump forward in time, to 1961. In Hawaii, Ann Dunham married a Kenyan gentleman named Barack Obama. This photo shows Ann holding their son named Barack Obama II, born on 4 August 1961:

As for the other little girl, Kathleen Walker, she was my mother.

It's a fact that both Ann Dunham and Kathleen Walker, brought up in continents on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, can be identified as great[3]-granddaughters of Kearneys settled in south-west Ireland at the end of the 18th century, within a radius of a hundred kilometers or so. As I've pointed out proudly in chapter 4 of my monograph entitled A Little Bit of Irish [display], the Kearney ancestors of my mother Kathleen Walker lived in the legendary village of Spancil Hill.

Walker ancestors

Yesterday, I indicated the existence of a chapter from A Little Bit of Irish concerning my links with the Braidwood bushrangers. From that same monograph, here is the main chapter on my Walker ancestors:



This chapter ends with an expression of my doubts concerning the alleged Catholic Irishness of my great-great-grandfather Charles Walker [1807-1860], who was quite possibly a Scottish Protestant: a young brother of the whisky inventor John Walker [1805-1857].

I'm taking risks in evoking spiritual subjects such as Catholicism, Protestantism and whisky in a single superficial sentence. There might be vapors of archaic blasphemy in what I've just said. Incidentally, I wonder what theological authorities in modern Ireland think of the sex of angels, or the maximum number of tiny angels that you can fit onto a pinhead. I'm sure they have strong opinions on such fascinating questions.

Braidwood bushrangers

About a year and a half ago, I placed the following document in the Issuu system:



It's a chapter of the monograph entitled A Little Bit of Irish, which presents my maternal genealogy.

Yesterday, I was thrilled to receive a friendly comment from a woman in Australia named Kylie Clarke, whose great-great-uncles Thomas Clarke [1840-1867] and John Clarke [1844-1867] were prominent bushrangers in the Braidwood district, executed by hanging in Sydney on 25 June 1867. For a while, my great-great-uncle William Hickey [1818-1901] was a member of their gang.

One of my ancestors was a bastard

I can imagined being admonished by a relative: "William, that's no way to talk about our ancestors!" Well, it's the literal truth. The ancestor in question is referred to technically—whether we like it or not—as a royal bastard. The story starts with King John.

In my article of 3 September 2009 entitled Genealogical breakthrough [display], I indicated that this monarch was one of my countless great(x22)-grandfathers. As every English-speaking schoolchild knows, one of the only positive acts of this appalling king consisted of his being forced to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. If you read his biography, you'll see that John married twice, to two women named Isabelle, the second of whom was the French matriarch of the Plantagenêt dynasty of English kings. But who was this alleged offspring of John named Richard FitzRoy, born in 1187, who was an ancestor of mine? Well, he was an illegitimate son of the 20-year-old future king and his cousin Suzanne de Warenne.

It's interesting to examine the names by which this bastard son is known. Sometimes he is given the Chilham surname, simply because he was born at Chilham Castle in Kent. (By coincidence, centuries later, this castle happened to be the residence of the late John Skeffington, 13th Viscount Massereene, with whom I once exchanged a series of letters about Skeffington genealogy.) I've seen him referred to as Richard Fitzjohn Chilham. Most often, though, he's known simply as Richard FitzRoy. Now, the elements of this apparent surname, FitzRoy, are synonymous with the French words fils (son) and roi (king). A FitzRoy is therefore a son—generally illegitimate—of a king, and this surname has always been a commonly-used generic title for royal bastards. After my ancestor Richard Fitzroy, there were two other famous FitzRoys:

— Henry FitzRoy [1519–1536], 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset, was the bastard son of King Henry VIII and his mistress Elizabeth Blount.

— A century later, another Henry FitzRoy [1663-1690], 1st Duke of Grafton, was the bastard son of King Charles II and Barbara Villiers.

I insist upon the fact that all the three Fitzroys I've mentioned carried this false "surname", not because they were related, but simply because they were bastard sons of a king.

A descendant of the Duke of Grafton, Charles Augustus FitzRoy [1796-1858], was the governor-general of Australia, and he named the New South Wales town of Grafton in honor of his grandfather Augustus FitzRoy [1735-1811], 3rd Duke of Grafton. And that's where I happened to be born (funnily enough, in a maternity clinic named Runnymede) in 1940.

For French readers interested in genealogy, I might point out that my ancestral line back up through King John and then William the Conqueror runs into a brick wall (maybe I should speak rather of a stone wall, or a wooden palisade) at the level of a fine 10th-century fellow named Conan I de Bretagne. (I assume he was a fine fellow, and I imagine that he might have been an ancestor of my ex-wife Christine, but the truth of the matter is that I know nothing whatsoever about him.) Besides, nobody will be surprised to hear that, at the level of King John, we're exactly 14 generations down from Charlemagne.

POST-SCRIPTUM: Here's a photo I took in August 2006 of the maternity clinic where I was born:

The former verandahs of the original building have been closed by insipid weatherboard walls with modern windows, and the base of the façades has been bricked in, producing the global effect of a dull cube. All the old-world architectural charm of the original edifice—which used to be of a greenish-gray color—has disappeared.

Having learned a few months ago that I descend from a royal bastard named Fitzroy—son of the future monarch who would sign reluctantly the Great Charter of Freedoms at Runnymede on 16 June 1215, laying the foundations of constitutional law as it still exists today—I'm amused to discover allusions to these events (of a strictly fortuitous and superficial nature) at the spot in the Antipodes where my peephole opened on 24 September 1940.

Two sides of the coin

With a mixture of amusement and melancholy, I've become aware that my Australian ancestors had indirect links of an anecdotal nature, on both the maternal and paternal sides, to the cotton mills of Preston in Lancashire. But we're talking about the opposite sides of a coin.

My Irish ancestors named O'Keefe and Dixon left their birthplace in County Clare, moved to the Preston region in Lancashire and worked in the mills in order to earn enough money to travel out to Australia. My future great-grandmother Mary O'Keefe was born in the industrial suburb of Preston named Walton-le-Dale on 26 May 1859 (which makes her, incidentally, my only known English-born ancestor on the maternal side).

I jump now to the case of my paternal grandmother's lovely young sister, Irene Marguerite Pickering, born out on a sheep property in New South Wales in 1900.

In 1924, 24-year-old Rita (as she was called) went on a trip to England, where she stayed with her uncle John Pickering, who was the chief librarian in the law courts of the Inner Temple in London. John and his wife Clara lived with their two daughters in an ancient mansion named Cedar House in Datchet, not far from Windsor Castle.

Here's a photo, taken at Cedar House in July 1924, of Rita surrounded by her uncle, aunt and cousins:

I can start, now, to present Rita's remote link to the Lancashire cotton mills. In the above photo, there's a clergyman. His name is John Russell Napier, and he was the 65-year-old vicar of the nearby parish church of Old Windsor. He had been invited along to the Pickering cottage, on this sunny summer afternoon, to make plans for Rita's forthcoming marriage to a 29-year-old Danish businessman named Paul Marvig (no doubt the person who took the above photo, and the owner of the automobile). For reasons that I ignore, Rita's marriage would be taking place, on 30 July 1924, not in John Napier's own church, but in the parish church of the Pickering's village, Datchet. In fact, the two churches, both in the vicinity of the Conqueror's thousand-year-old fortress at Windsor, are only a stone's throw apart.

On that same 1924 afternoon, we see here John Napier standing alongside 73-year-old John Pickering in front of the main entrance into Cedar House. Now, this reverend gentleman was in fact quite a famous personality... in the world of cricket (as I shall explain in a moment). First of all, let me say that he was born in Preston, Lancashire: the same place where my great-grandmother was born. John Napier was born there on 5 January 1859, that's to say less than five months before the birth of Mary O'Keefe. But the comparison stops there. Mary's parents worked at machines in the mills. John's parents, on the other hand, had designed and owned those very machines. He was the son of a wealthy industrialist, Richard Clay Napier, partner in the firm of Napier & Goodier, Lancashire cotton spinners.

Unlike the baby Mary O'Keefe, the baby John Napier was not destined to board a sailing ship for the Antipodes. Instead, he stayed in England, went up to Trinity College in Cambridge, and soon became an adept of theology and cricket. Playing for Lancashire in 1888, he was described by Australian opponents as the best fast bowler they had met in England.

The most frustrating aspect of all these genealogical reconstructions, retrospectively, is the idea—if not a fact—that the individuals of whom I'm speaking probably weren't aware of the information that I possess today. To take the most striking example, I'm not at all certain that John Pickering himself, residing as it were in the shadow of Windsor Castle, could have known that he was a descendant of William the Conqueror. After all, with the gigantic assistance of the Internet, it was only a couple of months ago that I made this discovery.

Finally, there's the more recent Australian context. As a child, I had the privilege of meeting up with Irene Pickering, who struck me as an alert, open-minded and sophisticated individual (where my use of "sophisticated" means both wise and worldly). I like to imagine that great-aunt Rita Marvig (née Pickering) might have run into my great-grandmother Mary Walker (née O'Keefe) one day, in Grafton, and said to her: "Mary, the vicar who married me in England back in 1924 was born in exactly the same town and the same year as you." There's just one hitch in this make-believe but perfectly plausible scenario. Mary O'Keefe died in 1933, whereas my parents didn't meet up until around 1940... whereupon I was procreated in a sunny haze of passion under Bawden's Bridge (so I'm told), on the outskirts of South Grafton.

The basic problem, as I see it now, retrospectively, is that our ancestors devoted so much energy to making love and procreating—Thank God! as Richard Dawkins might think but never say—that they simply didn't have much time left over to write down information and impressions that would be precious for posterity. Who would blame them? If I had to choose between taking out my pencil to draw the family tree, or rather to cuddle in a corner, I would never have hesitated. Consequently, reconstructions such as mine, today, run the risk of being incomplete and/or faulty: that's to say, screwed up.

Apple hit me on the head

Seeing that blog title, Corina is going to think: "Poor William was down on his knees adjusting computer cables when his MacBook rolled off the table and bounced on his skull." And she might add: "Let's hope his machine didn't get damaged." Well no, it was a quite different happening. Over the last day or so, I've been thrilled to find myself gravitating genealogically, like a wandering star, towards Isaac Newton. Scientifically-minded observers might call it a hypothetical Newtonian relationship. I can hear other readers saying: "A fortnight ago, he gave us his links to William the Conqueror. Today, it's Newton. He's out of his mind. At this rate, tomorrow, he'll be talking to us about his relatives in Nazareth." Apples have indeed caused tremendous upsets in human history, ever since Adam and Eve. And I don't deny for a moment that more recent impacts with these fruit of knowledge might have damaged my brain...

Here are the basic space-time elements of the global situation:

It's impossible to be much more precise than that, since it's hard to associate these individuals with exact dates and places. Notice the existence of Newton's maternal uncle, the Reverend William Ayscough (pronounced askew), who detected the genius of his 12-year-old nephew and arranged to send him to Trinity College (where William himself had been educated).

Now, here's an equally vague fragment of my own family tree:

In both cases, the Ayscoughs are located in Lincolnshire, and the time frames are equivalent. It's funny to see that my ancestors Thomas Latton and Mary Ayscough were married in London (at the Church of St Benet Paul's Wharf) just a month after the marriage of Newton's parents. Besides, my ancestor John Latton (at one time deputy lieutenant of the county of Surrey), son of Mary Ayscough, was born in the same year as Isaac Newton, son of Hannah Ayscough.

I'm tempted to imagine that the two individuals named William Ayscough in the above charts might in fact be identical, in which case my ancestor Mary Ayscough would have been a first cousin of Isaac Newton. Devil's advocates will point out to me that Newton's uncle William was a clergyman, probably a Catholic priest. So, it's hard to admit the sinful speculation of Father Ayscough as the father of Mary. I disagree. Ever since the apple of Eden, anything's possible.

Other Norman ancestors... besides the Conqueror

Up until a month ago, I had never heard of a village in Normandy named Estouteville (known today as Estouteville-Écalles), nor of the English descendants of that place—the Stutville family—whose surname evoked their Norman origin. A month ago, on the eve of my monumental Internet collapse, I had just learned that my paternal ancestors in England named Latton were descendants of the Stutvilles of Estouteville. I must admit, however, that I am unlikely to unearth a detailed paper trail concerning the Stutvilles of the same quality as my direct links to the Conqueror, as presented in my previous post, entitled Genealogical breakthrough [display].

In other words, I retain the fine but fuzzy idea that I'm a descendant of the English Stutvilles whose origin was the Norman village of Estouteville... but I shall surely remain eternally incapable of substantiating that claim by means of hard genealogical facts.

Meanwhile, I'm impressed by various well-documented French descendants of that Norman village and its noble family.

The cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville, for example, pleaded in favor of Joan of Arc.

I shall be investigating both this Norman village and its descendants... and attempting to link them more precisely, if possible, to our Lattons.

Genealogical breakthrough

Just before my Internet went down, I made a fascinating discovery in the context of my paternal genealogy. The ancestral line of my grandmother Kathleen Pickering [1889-1964] leads back in a highly-documented fashion—with relatively credible and complete records for most of the way—to King John [1166/7-1216]. From there, of course, we get back to William the Conqueror [1024-1087].

Normally, if you click that chart on the left, your browser should display a more readable presentation of this résumé of my ancestral line back to the Conqueror.

I've already started to set down this stuff on paper, as the final chapter of a document on my paternal ancestors entitled They Sought the Last of Lands. Click the following banner to access a new blog on this subject, which displays a link to the website concerning my paper document. For the moment, only the preface and chapter 6 are available.

This document will finally include all my known Skyvington genealogy... which is not yet firmly linked in a documented fashion (contrary to what I have always imagined, and tried to confirm) to ancestors who write their name as Skeffington. The future document will also present my ancestors with surnames such as Mepham, Pickering, Latton, etc.

Good timing for bad communications

August is an unusual month in France, because one has the impression that half the nation is on vacation. Paris, in particular, closes down to a large extent, or at least quietens down considerably (from a traffic viewpoint), and certain residents prefer to remain there in August to appreciate calmly various aspects of the capital. The rue Rambuteau, where we lived for ages, used to take on a village atmosphere in August. You could sit down at a sidewalk table at the corner café, without being swarmed by pedestrians, and read the newspaper. Obviously, what I've just said does not apply to touristic quarters of Paris such as the Champs-Elysées, the Eiffel Tower and the Latin Quarter.

So, you might say that my Internet connection chose the ideal time to break down... when most people are outside in the sunny weather, rather than seated in front of their computer screens. Incidentally, in McDonald places, I've got accustomed to choosing a table in a corner where the sunlight doesn't affect the readability of the MacBook screen. I've also realized that, to avoid dirtying my nice little machine, it's preferable to stick to stuff such as ice cream and Coke, rather than McDonald's greasy products. For health reasons, too, this was no doubt a wise decision.

It's not impossible that many of the technical employees at Free (my Internet service provider) were on vacation at the moment that my connection went down. In any case, over the last three weeks, no Free technician ever phoned me up (on my iPhone), let alone came here to see what might be broken. Fortunately, yesterday, Free accepted immediately my request to end my contract. In my letter, I didn't even have to get around to using nasty words to describe their faulty service. So, in a few days, I'll have a new telephone and Internet service, provided by the state-operated Orange company, along with a new email address (which I do not know yet). I'll even have a new phone number:

04 76 64 18 32 (inside France) or
33 4 76 64 18 32 (from another country)

As before, I'll be able to phone free to most countries in the world (including, of course, Australia).

[Click the above banner to mail me.]

Here's a photo of my recently-acquired set of McDonald Coke glasses, to which I'm still adding new specimens:

This precious collection will be a personal souvenir of the events of August 2009. Meanwhile, I'll wait until my new Internet connection is operational before describing in detail the genealogical jackpot that hit me, when I was least expecting it, on the eve of my Internet collapse. In a nutshell, I've just discovered precisely that my 27-times-great-grandfather from France, named William, invaded England in 1066... exactly nine centuries before the birth of my French daughter. The connection (I'm talking of genealogy, not the Internet) has nothing to do with ancestors named Skyvington, but exists through my paternal grandmother, Kathleen Pickering, who grew up on a bush property in Australia. Her brother was a World War I hero who, through his sporting and military prowess, was nicknamed King. My father, born at the time "King" Pickering returned from the Western Front, then received his heroic uncle's nickname (to my mind, a silly choice) as his own official given name. My dear father could not know that, among his distant ancestors, there were no less than four genuine kings of England, including the monarch who signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215.

Final family

After fiddling around in genealogy for over a quarter of a century, and getting held up joyously for many years by maternal rural bush-ranger ingredients from Ireland, I've finally got around to starting to set down in words the essential paternal stuff.

The truth of the matter (which isn't necessarily "true" in any sense whatsoever) is that I've always felt that my dominant genes were essentially English. They're labeled Skyvington and Pickering: the surnames of my paternal grandparents. I would be incapable of proving (if this idea had any sense whatsoever) that my Skyvington and Pickering genes overpowered, as it were, the recessive X-rated Walker and Kennedy stuff in my DNA (not to mention the wild Hickey contribution). I'm convinced that this is what happened... but I'm ready to be contradicted.

The modest family-history typescript upon which I'm embarking will concern two marvelous individuals whom I've always referred to as Pop and Ma: Ernest William Skyvington [1891-1985] and his wife Kathleen Pickering [1889-1964].

For a long time, I had imagined that Pop came from a celebrated family whose origins coincide with the arrival of William the Conqueror in England. I still believe, more than ever, that this was the case.

But I'm amazed and delighted to discover that Ma, too, through her Pickering antecedents, was hugely ancient English... and that her ancestors included an aunt of Jane Grey.

So, I intend to write their Anglo/Australian story.

Family history

I certainly didn't grow up with any particular interest in family history. In my childhood context in Grafton, genealogy was not an everyday topic of discussion. Retrospectively, I greatly regret the fact that I never got around to asking my elders for stories about their past. Worse still, I remember times when such stories were forthcoming, but it was I who wasn't interested in listening. For example, my paternal grandmother once started to tell me about her ancestors in Northern Ireland referred to as Orange Men, and this subject bored me to such an extent that I didn't take notice of anything she said... and today I'm totally incapable of following up this link, about which I possess no data whatsoever.

I've nevertheless made progress in this domain. The time has come to start thinking about sharing the results of my research with others, including descendants. People who are no more than vaguely aware of my existence have a good chance of discovering my genealogical websites through Google. A broader challenge consists of making data available to people who have no idea whatsoever of my existence.

A good approach consists, I think, of publishing my global family tree with the time-honored RootsWeb organization, which administers an easy-to-use project named WorldConnect.

An interesting aspect this system is that people are free to download my family tree in the form of a so-called gedcom file, which they can then examine and use on their own computers.

Snippets and stutters

My title is a fanciful allusion to the two basic entities used in the fascinating domain of family-history research based upon DNA, which has interested me now for several months. There are so many novel concepts and bits of necessary know-how in this field that I've started to set them down in the form of a text, which might one day be of use to other newcomers.

The first thing you discover about this exciting new genealogical tool is that there are two quite different approaches:

-- A female can have her DNA tested to learn about her matriarchal line: that's to say, her mother, her mother's mother, the mother of her mother's mother, and so on. This testing uses mitochondrial DNA, designated in short as mtDNA.

-- A male can have his mtDNA tested in exactly the same way, and the results will be identical to those of his sisters. A male can also have his Y-chromosome tested, to learn about his father, his father's father, the father of his father's father, and so on.

Since a female researcher doesn't have Y-chromosomes, she can't be tested in this second way. But that's not a problem as long as she can call upon either her father, a brother or some other male relative on her paternal side to obtain such Y-chromosome information.

For the moment, personally, I've been tested only at this second level. The results are directly linked to the ancient origins of the Skyvington surname, which is currently being documented.

Let me explain rapidly the sense of my blog title:

-- In a strand of DNA, in a so-called junk region of the molecule (lying outside the coded sections that determine our nature), it can happen that a single letter is suddenly and mysteriously misspelled. For example, a meaningless "word" that has been spelled CAT since time immemorial suddenly reappears, in the DNA of an offspring, with a spelling error: say CGT. An error of this kind is called a single-nucleotide polymorphism [SNP, pronounced snip]. Now, this kind of mutation is extremely rare, but once such a mispelling occurs, the error is reproduced forever after. Some 16 to 18 millennia ago, there was a famous Y-chromosome snip referred to as M343, and one of the fellows with this trivial spelling error in his junk DNA happened to become the great-granddaddy of all of us western Europeans. So, if you find this M343 snip in your DNA, you can be fairly sure that some of your paternal ancestors once spent some time in western Europe.

-- In a strand of DNA, something akin to stuttering takes place when a tiny fragment is repeated several times, for no apparent reason. In a certain individual, a specific instance of such stuttering might involve, say, 14 repetitions, whereas another person might have a count of 13 or maybe 15. This stuttering is called short tandem repeats [STR, pronounced by naming separately each of the three letters: ess-tee-ahr]. Whenever the number of repeats is augmented (suddenly and mysteriously, as for snips, but far more often), the new value is reproduced in descendants of the mutated individual.

Let's leave things there for the moment, because I don't necessarily intend that Antipodes should be transformed into a series of biology lessons. But I'll return rapidly to these subjects, because I've been learning a lot of interesting things, over the last few days, about my paternal snippets and stutters.

Our concestor Ida

Like countless Earth-dwellers, I was moved by the fabulously beautiful image of our concestor Ida.

Even Google got into the act immediately, which proves (if need be) that the discovery and presentation of the fossil is a cosmic happening:

The term "concestor" was introduced into the terminology of tribal history (or genealogy, if you prefer) by Richard Dawkins in his monumental The Ancestor's Tale. It stands for "the (latest) common ancestor". For example, when a Skyvington in Choranche encounters, say, an individual named Skivington over in Canada, it's quite possible that their concestor was a 17th-century farmer named George over in Dorset, England. Researchers concerned with individuals X and Y are interested, above all, in identifying the latest concestor: that's to say, the common ancestor whose offspring split into two forever-separate lines, one of which ended up producing X, and the other, Y.

Juvenile Ida ("lovely Laura in her light green dress") looks a little like a modern lemur:

Let's say that 47-million-year-old Ida was almost a lemur... like our human ancestors, for that matter. But certain telltale features reveal that Ida had jumped onto the human, rather than the lemur, band wagon. She was surely one of us: an ancient member of our human tribe. Welcome aboard, Ida!

My DNA data

I guess I could say that this is the first official certificate I've ever received from an American institution. And I didn't even have to do any hard work to obtain it. Now, this is terribly personal information, like the image of my skull in one of my early blog articles [display], which greatly disturbed my longtime friend Odile. But there's no personal copyright attached to my DNA certificate, and I wouldn't mind at all if this data were to get stolen by all kinds of hackers and scientists with secret plans to clone me.

The Texan folk who tested me have also supplied a nice little map showing how my ancestors moved away from the territory of our African patriarch known as Adam, and finally ended up here in France... where members of the family were called Cro-Magnon long before they got around to adopting a nicer surname, Skyvington. Without wishing to appear snobbish, I'm happy they made that name change, because Cro-Magnons were as common, back at that time, as today's Smiths and Duponts.

My folk are indicated by the arrow marked R1b, which means that they followed a long trail through central Asia before getting here. In fact, it's a mere 25 millennia since they moved away from the territory marked R, located in the vicinity of modern Kazakhstan, and set off westwards towards Europe.

For the moment, I haven't found any genetic cousins (individuals with exactly the same marker values) with a surname like mine, but I'm trying to persuade various Skivington and Skeffington men throughout the world to get tested. This genetic genealogy adventure will be followed up in my specialized Skeffington Genealogy blog [display] whose banner appears in the right-hand column of the present blog. At an anecdotal level, I've mentioned there that I was proud to learn that Richard Dawkins happens to be one of my genetic cousins.

Four new blogs

For several reasons (both communicational and technical), I've decided to attach blogs to four of my existing websites. These new blogs have the following banners, which I've placed in the right-hand column of the present blog. In fact, all my blogs and websites are linked together in such a way that it's easy to move from one to another.












































These are not diary-type blogs, like Antipodes, but rather forums for discussion. In the context of my family-history research, the first two blogs will of course be associated with my genealogical writing. As for the two blogs in French, Choranche is the commune where my Gamone property is located, and Pont-en-Royans is the neighboring village. Concerning these two places, I have been doing extensive local-history research.

In the case of any of these four blogs, I would hope that other individuals might join me as so-called team members, meaning that they can post their own articles in an autonomous fashion. People wishing to accept this proposal should contact me by email.