Painted myself into a genealogical corner

WARNING: This lengthy and rather austere article is intended for a limited readership of fellow genealogical researchers.

When I first started to explore my paternal genealogy, three decades ago, I envisaged my research according to the following schema:

At the top of the schema, the red arrow corresponds to the history of an ancient English family that came into existence, in the wake of the Norman Conquest, in a village of present-day Leicestershire. Around 1800, the celebrated English historian John Nichols spoke of this village and family in the following elogious terms:

This village gave name to the Skevingtons, an ancient and noble family, who have continued owners thereof for several centuries; and they have produced many men of note and abilities, who have repeatedly by their lives adorned the historic page. Few families in the kingdom can boast of more ancient and honourable descent, or have more eminently distinguished themselves on all occasions.

For the moment, we have no idea of the identity of the Conqueror's companion who became the progenitor of the people to be known in England, later on, as Skeffington (or a spelling variant on that term). It's quite likely that this Norman patriarch actually left older brothers on the family estates in Normandy… and it's thinkable that descendants of these older brothers exist today, maybe even in Normandy. As a longtime Francophile, I've always imagined that it would be a fabulous thrill to meet up, today, with genetic cousins in modern France… and DNA testing means that this possibility is becoming plausible.

Back in 1981, when I started my genealogical research into Skyvington ancestors, it was a rather bare-bones affair. My grandfather had even assured me that no records concerning his ancestors could possibly exist on the surface of the planet, and that the last traces of his background had been wiped out by the Blitz! This, of course, was sheer nonsense… but I now realize that he may have been intent upon avoiding embarrassing questions concerning his father, mentioned in my article of 3 May 2010 entitled Family-history shock [display]. In any case, my research soon led me back over half-a-dozen generations, ending up with a George Skivington [1670-1711] of Dorset. Throughout this research, I've been constantly on the lookout for events that might enable my backward-pointing green arrow to meet up with the mainstream red arrow. In other words, I've been trying to determine the exact point at which my Skivington/Skyvington branch might have broken away from the mainstream Skeffington line.

Let me summarize rapidly some of the major mileposts on that red arrow… which are presented in detail in my Skeffington monograph, whose chapters can be downloaded from this website. The earliest-known members of the English family were referred to as John de Skefynton [1188], Simon de Scheftinton [1193] and Odo de Scevington [1231].

In the first quarter of the 16th century, during the reigns of the Tudor kings Henry VII and Henry VIII, two knights appeared on the British historical scene: Sir William Skeffington [1460-1535] and his young brother Sir John Skeffington [1470-1525]. Artillery skills had launched William's career, and his nickname was the Gunner. His son Thomas, too, was a soldier.

Over two centuries later, another major Skeffington milestone was the London marriage in 1654 of Sir John Skeffington of Fisherwick [1629-1695] to Mary Clotworthy, which enabled him to obtain the Irish Massereene viscountcy. From that point on, alongside the identified offspring of the Massereene lords, various unidentified branches of folk named Skeffington started to appear, first in Ireland, and later in the New World. Personally, I've never succeeded in determining their exact time-place origins.

In a letter to me in 1980, the 13th Viscount Massereene referred flippantly to this proliferation of Irish Skeffingtons as "quite a varied bag", while admitting the possibility of cases of illegitimate children. In any case, to identify the patriarchs of such branches, their living descendants would need to work backwards… in the same routine manner that I've adopted for my Skyvington research. That would be their only hope of discovering possible links with the mainstream Skeffington line. For example, I've often heard of a certain Peter Skeffington, born in Ireland around 1785, whose sons emigrated to the New World. I see half-a-dozen Skeffington males who might have been the natural father of this Peter, at that troubled moment in the history of the Skeffingtons (when the lunatic 2nd Earl of Massereene was still lingering in a Paris prison for debtors). Maybe a Canadian or American descendant of this Peter should spend time searching for traces of their ancestor in the PRONI [Public Record Office of Northern Ireland] in Belfast, which apparently houses all the extant Skeffington/Massereene family archives.

Today, the tip of the red arrow is John Skeffington, the 14th Viscount Massereene. Concerning this 70-year-old gentleman (who doesn't give me the impression that he's particularly interested in family history), an important point must be made. There would be no point whatsoever in looking for Y-chromosome matches between the viscount and Normans who might be our genetic cousins. Why not? Well, the Skeffington male genetic line was broken through the marriage of Harriet Skeffington with Thomas Foster in 1810. Since then, the male progeny is indeed called Skeffington, but their Y-chromosomes are those of Thomas Foster. On the other hand, illegitimate Skeffington offspring who existed before the time of that marriage could well convey the original Y-chromosomes of the Norman patriarchs. Regardless, I advise all Skeffington males concerned by genealogy to get their DNA tested!

Now, what has been happening concerning my green arrow, and the likelihood of its running into the red arrow? Well, the discovery of the above-mentioned George Skivington in Dorset means that the tip of my green arrow has moved backwards to such an extent that my Ski(y)vington family history could not have been linked to the Massereene lords or Irish Skeffingtons. That's to say, the Massereene dynasty and the Irish Skeffingtons are simply not a part of my personal family history. So, I don't intend to carry on researching in this arena.

The separation between the green and red arrows extends still further back in time. Recently, I've encountered references to rural families and individuals whose name is written as Skevington, who are anterior to the Tudor lords. In other words, the time slot in which my little green arrow might join up with the mainstream red arrow can only be somewhere during the four centuries between 1066 and the Tudor lords. In other words, much of what I have written in my Skeffington monograph turns out to be totally irrelevant as far as my personal family history is concerned. And it's in that sense that I say, jokingly, that I've painted myself into a genealogical corner!

To put it bluntly, I now have every right to wonder who in fact, in this whole affair, is legitimately "mainstream": the noble dynasty that emanated from the Tudor lords, or my humble line of Ski(y)vingtons? On their side, the advantages are significant, primarily in numbers (all those folk named Skeffington), historical celebrity (but let us not exaggerate) and the quality of archives. An advantage on our side, however, is the regularity of generations of modest rural folk, devoid of the crimes, notoriety, legacy quarrels and sheer madness that have often characterized the noble Skeffingtons. And above all, on the Ski(y)vington side, there is still the very real possibility of our direct Y-chromosome descent from the anonymous Norman patriarch who reached England with the Conqueror.

Since I've been able to acquire a certain amount of experience in Skeffington history, I would like to tidy up my monograph so that it might be of use to researchers. That is, I don't intend to throw out the baby with the bath water. But, while continuing to advocate the potential of DNA testing, I'll have to make it clear to readers that it is beyond me (no longer within my personal domain of interest) to attempt to construct any kind of genealogical chart concerning the possible origins of Irish and New World Skeffingtons. Even the genealogy of such a major historical figure as Francis Sheehy-Skeffington remains, for me, a mystery. As I've been saying for years, I would hope that concerned researchers end up tackling the question of the history of Irish Skeffington families.

Meanwhile, I shall transfer the strictly Ski(y)vington fragments of my research to another monograph: in fact, to the document I recently started entitled They Sought the Last of Lands.

Ebook version of a genealogical document

Yesterday, I decided to carry out a hands-on test concerning the idea of distributing genealogical stuff in ebook format. So, instead of wasting my time witnessing the fact that "there's nothing like the Socceroos", I spent my evening building an ebook version of chapter 7 of my monograph entitled They Sought the Last of Lands. Click the following image to download it:

I believe that you should be able to transfer the downloaded file to an iPad, but I haven't tested this possibility (because I don't yet own an iPad). Otherwise, you can click the following banner to obtain a free copy of the Adobe Digital Editions software tool, which will enable you to read my file comfortably:

Unfortunately my test was not exactly conclusive. Indeed it was disappointing in the sense that the challenge of creating such an ebook turns out to be quite messy and time-consuming from a layout point of view. I had to readjust the sizes of many of the images and genealogical charts, and attempt to implement all kinds of vertical spacing tricks, but I'm still not satisfied with the aesthetic results. Worse still, after all these messy operations, I'm left with an ugly set of complicated code files, which would not be easy to update.

My conclusion? For the time being, I think it's preferable for me to stick to the conventional method of distributing my genealogical chapters in the form of .pdf files.

Exemplary Australian scholarship

I've always known that, when my compatriots decide to tackle seriously various cutting-edge challenges of an intellectual or scientific nature, they are capable of producing world-class results. A typical example of Australian excellence concerns the domain of the computer processing of our journalistic heritage.

Click the banner to discover a fabulous website that offers us access to our nation's newspapers from 1803 to 1954. Needless to say, my praise of this kind of historical and technological effort is unbounded, since it enables every one of us to explore freely the events of our past.

My grandfather Ernest William Skyvington [1891-1985] once told me of his arrival in Sydney on Christmas Day, 1908. He described the thrill of seeing excited crowds at the Rushcutter Bay stadium, the following day (known traditionally as Boxing Day), awaiting the monumental match (which would go down in history) between the white man Tommy Burns and the Negro Jack Johnson. What a fabulous symbol for a young lad who has just arrived in the Antipodes. The website offers us a short article concerning this match:

I'll surely be spending many long hours in front of this wonderful Australian website, which can reveal so many secrets about our past. As you might imagine, I jumped immediately onto the issue of The Sydney Morning Herald dated 24 September 1940… when my peephole opened at the Runnymede maternity clinic in Grafton. Well, I'll let you share my joy (if you're interested in this kind of archaic stuff) by discovering that the king of England himself made a celebrated wartime speech on that very day. Personally, alas, I was far too young to hear him. Indeed, I'm not sure that anybody did.

In memory of my grandmother

Upon the death of his wife in 1964, my grandfather Ernest Skyvington reacted in the style of a prosperous businessman and dutiful Anglican citizen (who played chess regularly with the dean of the cathedral) by sponsoring the installation of a magnificent stained-glass memorial window in Grafton's Christchurch Cathedral… which is by far the finest of the rare Skyvington evocations in my birthplace.

At my humble level, I find myself celebrating differently the memory of my grandmother Kathleen Pickering [1889-1964] by researching and writing about her ancestry. I have just produced a new downloadable version of chapter 7 [download PDF file] of my monograph entitled They Sought the Last of Lands.

An ancestor who published Cinderella

Yesterday, I wrote about my great-grandfather William Skyvington, who must have spent a particularly nasty period of six months in a notorious London prison. Even to be able to lie down there on something looking vaguely like a bed, you had to have friends on the outside with money, to purchase that privilege… otherwise you spent the night sitting around with crowds of poor inmates on the freezing muddy floors of the jail's stinking rat-infested cellars. And that was just over a century ago, in the grand capital city of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother Eliza Mepham, aged 34, was dying of tuberculosis behind the façade of this posh little house at 16 Marriott Road in northern London.

As for my future grandfather Ernest Skyvington, cared for by his Mepham aunts in another house, he carried on going to school in Woodstock Road, probably unaware that his father was in jail.

He once told me that his constant dream, at that time, was to get aboard a cargo ship of the kind on which his uncle William Mepham was a captain, and to sail away to the Antipodes… where he would be able to ride a horse through the bush. In 1908, the 17-year-old lad finally found such a ship, the SS Marathon, whose master was a colleague of Captain Mepham.

The SS Marathon reached Sydney six weeks later... which meant that it was quite a rapid vessel for that epoch. Ernest Skyvington set foot in Sydney on Christmas Day 1908, and William Mepham and his wife Gertrude Driscoll were waiting on the wharf to welcome the young man to his new land. The Mephams lived at Rushcutters Bay, which was the site at that time of Australia’s best-known boxing stadium. The fighters Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson were to meet here on Boxing Day 1908 (an ideally-named day) for the world heavyweight title. That Saturday, Ernest woke up on Australian soil for the first time in his life, and it so happened that he was rambling around in sunny Rushcutters Bay at the moment that Burns and Johnson arrived at the stadium. But the boy from London did not yet have enough money in his pocket to pay for a seat at such a boxing match.

WARNING INSERTED IN NOVEMBER 2016

I was recently informed by a friendly English fellow that the rest of this blog post is totally erroneous. My ancestor John Harris [1756-1846] certainly existed, but he had nothing to do with another individual, of the same name, who published the Cinderella stuff. I hope that true descendants of the publisher will forgive me for this silly blunder.

Today, as an outcome of lengthy Google searches, I discovered a lot of interesting stuff about a Londoner in the ancestral line of my paternal grandmother. I'm speaking of John Harris [1756-1846], who was my 4xgreat-grandfather. He was a publisher, specialized in children's books, with a bookshop alongside St Paul's Cathedral, seen here:

I was thrilled to learn this afternoon that he had published a wide variety of high-quality works, many of which can be downloaded today from the Internet. One of the nicest publications I found was his Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper (John Harris, London, 1827), which contains beautiful hand–colored woodcuts.

The Cinderella story is so familiar that we can more-or-less figure out what's happening for each of the following woodcuts:














These splendid illustrations remind me of the celebrated Epinal images created in France by Jean-Charles Pellerin [1756-1836], who was a contemporary of John Harris. I have spoken already of this famous French tradition of simple and colorful graphic work in my article of 6 March 2007 entitled Epinal images [display] and in my article of 17 May 2007 entitled Upside-down world [display].

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.