Future world of Genetic Inheritance

Let me call it the GI-world. Humanity is leaving an era in which the letters “G.I.” generally evoked soldiers of the United States Army and airmen of the United States Army Air Forces. We are now moving slowly but surely into a new era in which those same two letters are likely to be used to designate Genetic Inheritance: that’s to say, the part of human behavior that is derived more from Nature than from Nurture. The stuff that happened to be written already on the slate when we were born.

Observers often think it would be nice to believe that our slates are blank at the moment of our birth, and that children then meet up with countless real-world experiences enabling them to extend and enrich the writing on their personal slates. This blank-slate vision might be partly valid, but researchers discovered cases of identical twins, brought up in worlds apart, who adopted highly similar behaviors, suggesting that fragments of their DNA code were apparently duplicated.

Commonsense often makes us imagine that such afflictions as alcoholism or insanity might indeed be present “in the family”, meaning that the offspring of afflicted ancestors might indeed have an inherited tendency to fall into drinking or madness. While it’s extremely difficult to prove that this might be true, many observers feel that human behavior can be the outcome of a subtle mixture of Nature and Nurture. It’s possibly what a French humorist referred to as Nightingale Pastry. The stuffing is obtained by mixing together nightingale meat and horse meat in equal proportions: the flesh of one nightingale mixed with the flesh of one horse. In the Nature versus Nurture context, it’s still hard to determine whether the code already present on the slate was a huge horse or rather a tiny nightingale. No doubt a bit of both.

I believe personally that, in the future GI-world, a new class of investigators will examine simultaneously both the horse and the nightingale. For example, if both a mother and her daughter manifest symptoms of the kind designated as bipolar disease, then they might envisage the possibility that the daughter inherited this disorder from her mother. In order to form an opinion on this question, other individuals on the patient’s genealogical tree might be brought into the picture. Have comparable behavioral characteristics been observed at several places on the family tree ?

DNA-based investigations have revolutionized many aspects of our existence. At the modest level of my family-history research, a couple of trivial Y-chromosome tests enabled me to confirm the identity of one of my paternal great-grandfathers: Chromosomes reveal the truth.

Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985] between his parents in London. My grandfather could never tell me what had happened to his father.

Sooner or later, in tomorrow’s GI-world, whenever we’re confronted with striking cases of weird behavior inside the family, observers will not be unduly surprised if observers decide to browse through both genealogical and biological data of all kinds. Pluridisciplinary research of that kid will appear to observers as no less unusual than, say, conventional psychoanalysis or psychotherapeutics.

Noms de famille

Oxford vient de publier un énorme dictionnaire de noms de famille.

En ce qui concerne mon nom à moi, Skyvington, je n'ai vraiment pas de chance. Il n'y aucune présence dans le dictionnaire d'un être qui aurait porté ce nom. Tant pis. En revanche, si je me contente des trois premières lettres de mon nom, Sky, on me dit que le dictionnaire offre 8.281 individus.

Si ce dictionnaire vous intéresse, vous avez probablement toujours la chance de le consulter gratuitement ICI avec le nom fanbi et le mot de passe onlineaccess.

Ancestry company’s DNA conclusions “mostly total bollocks”

                                            Graham Roumieu for BuzzFeed News

I was pleased to hear the British geneticist Adam Rutherford saying that the conclusions of the BritainsDNA company are “eloquent, but mostly total bollocks”. Click here to read an amusing article in BuzzFeed by Tom Chivers that pulls no punches on this subject.

It so happens that my limited use of Y-chromosomal testing carried out by a US company was highly successful in the sense that it enabled me to prove that my paternal great-grandfather William Skyvington [1868-1959] was a scoundrel, indeed a crazy nincompoop. Click here to visit a page on this so-called Courtenay Affair. I've handled the facts in detail in my book They Sought the Last of Lands, Gamone Press (Choranche), which can be purchased through Amazon. Published in 2014, its number is ISBN 978-2-919427-02-4.

My personal Y-chromosome data is displayed publicly on the ysearch website. Curiously, apart from the Courtenay Affair, I’ve never obtained the slightest match with a so-called “genetic cousin”. This seems to suggest that we Skyvington folk are rather rare birds.

Mongrel genes

Every family has a few black sheep, either in the present or in the past. Most often both. And a family historian, believing that every effect has a logical cause, is inevitably inclined to start looking around for mongrel genes: biological factors that gave rise to the existence of such-and-such a black sheep. Now, in such research, there can be both a bit of good and a lot of bad.

The very notion of a certain black sheep in the family can be frighteningly fuzzy. Relatives might think they’re acting objectively when they stigmatize a particular individual as a black sheep. Or decide rather, for that matter, to praise an exceptionally snow-white sheep. But are the relatives themselves pure merinos with an error-free sense of judgment? As for me, I prefer to believe that the supposed existence of a black sheep in the family must always be taken with a grain of salt. Maybe it’s right… but maybe it’s wrong.

The case of alleged family defects such as alcoholism is worse still. Does such-and-such a past or present member of the family drink because of inherited defects… or simply because he/she happens to have easy access to dangerous beverages? It’s far too easy and too silly to declare that there are, or have been, alcohol problems in the family. If the family historian is not perfectly sure of what is being said, then she/he should simply shut up, because false declarations are worse than no declarations at all. [The current Skyvington family historian is proud to declare—just for the record—that he hasn't tasted a drop of alcohol, or even been vaguely interested in doing so, for well over a year, since falling down the stairs at Gamone and bumping his head.]

To me, one thing is certain. Whenever family members start searching for inherited defects, they should look carefully into the terribly common phenomenon of nasty bumps to the brain. Since falling down the stairs, it has taken me a long time to get back to a state that I myself judge as normal.

At the present moment, I’ve been greatly affected by thoughts about an infamous Skyvington black sheep: my paternal great-grandfather, the crazy fellow who called himself “William Courtenay”. See my blog post here. Over the last few days, I’ve received new information from England revealing the admirable character of this fellow’s father. That renders suspicious the mad fellow’s mother, Mary Ann.

Would that poor girl, who died in Yealmpton [Devon] at the age of 21, have been responsible for the introduction of mongrel genes into the Skyvington line? That idea, though theoretically plausible, is quite unlikely, for Mary Anne Jones belonged to an honorable family of Devon, in which no known cases of insanity have been recorded.

Whichever way I look at things (and I’ve thought a lot about that mad ancestor), only one explanation satisfies me fully. Unknown to archivists in general, and Skyvington family historians in particular, my ancestor William Skyvington [1868-1959] probably ran into the same kind of accident as his future great-grandson, also known as William Skyvington. He fell down the stairs and bumped his head. If that was really what happened (and why not?), then all I can say is that I got off better than my mad ancestor. If only God existed, I would promptly thank him.

Is genealogy all about genes?

That's not meant to be a trick question, but it is surely a tricky question. And I'm not at all certain that I can indeed reply correctly and intelligently. Both the ancient term "genealogy" (study of generations of ancestors) and the relatively modern biological word "gene" (one of the many molecular elements of an individual's DNA) are inspired by the same root: γενεά ‎(geneá, "generation, descent"). So, the obvious answer to my question is yes: the study of genealogy is surely concerned by some kind of an examination of an individual's DNA. Having made that point, I'm obliged to say that, for the moment, the concrete associations between conventional family-history preoccupations and modern genetic methods are not at all obvious.

It's well known that many everyday family-history enthusiasts are tempted to pay fees to US laboratories specializing in genetic enhancements to everyday genealogy, usually of a complex nature. I made this decision several years ago, without fully understanding the exact advantages that I might (or might not) acquire. I can now say that I derived few avantages of the kind I was expecting, and nothing proves to my mind that the alleged missions of such companies are as sound as they make themselves out to be. On the other hand, an unexpected family-history event enabled me to discover that this kind of enhancement of ordinary family-history research can give rise to a startling result. I'm talking of the extraordinary Courtenay affair concerning the chance discovery of my paternal great-grandfather.

http://skyvington.blogspot.fr/2014/08/chromosomes-reveal-truth.html

On page 48 of The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, there's a precise and brilliant explanation of "a telling difference between gene trees and people trees". Here, for example, is a "people tree" of my own childhood family in Australia:

That's me on the middle left, then my brother followed by our three sisters. Now, the questions introduced by Dawkins could be put as follows: In the case of a specific gene that's responsible for such-and-such an aspect of the character of a particular child, did that child inherit that gene from our father or from our mother, and was it the same gene that was inherited (from the same parent) by the other four siblings?

The answers to those two questions astonished me greatly when I first encountered them, and I'm sure that many people might be surprised, for they prove beyond any doubt whatsoever that siblings in a sole "people tree" do not necessarily acquire their specific character traits from the same "gene trees". To put it bluntly, brothers and sisters do not necessarily share identical character traits. Let us imagine, for example, my brother's genes that played a role in making him behave character-wise in a particular fashion. It is perfectly thinkable that none of Don's siblings had inherited comparable genes. Don's gene might have come, for example, from the father of Enid Kathleen Walker, whereas my corresponding version of this gene might have come, say, from the mother of King Mepham Skyvington.

This appears to me as a highly significant and fundamental law of inheritance, which should not be ignored.

My ancestor King John

Elias Ashmole's suggestion that my Latton ancestors descended from the illustrious Estouteville family was published in 1719, with superficial documentary evidence. In They Sought the Last of Lands, I explored the possible origins of this alleged Estouteville/Latton link, and concluded that it probably came about during the 12th century, in the context of Latton Priory in Essex, through the marriage of Robert de Stuteville with Sibyl de Valognes.

Click to enlarge

Today, 15 June 2015, is the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta by our ancestor King John.

Our descent from this monarch passes through one of his illegitimate sons, Richard Chilham.

Yesterday, I discovered, quite by chance, that Richard’s maternal family, whose French surname was de Warenne, provides us with a link to the original French line of the Estoutevilles. It’s a trivial link between two sisters and their respective husbands, but this information nevertheless adds weight to the Estouteville/Latton hypothesis presented in my book. The starting point of this newly-discovered link is a famous personage, Geoffrey Plantagenêt, Count of Anjou [1113-1151], who reposes peacefully (except for the last 24 hours) in the capital of the ancient French province of Maine, Le Mans.

Geoffrey got his “Plantagenêt” nickname through his habit of decorating his hat with a sprig of the yellow broom shrub [genêt in French].

Geoffrey went down in history as the father of Henry II of England, founder of the Plantagenet dynasty. Not surprisingly, Geoffrey had several illegitimate children. His son Hamelin (nothing to do with the German town of the Pied Piper), of an unidentified mother, was invited by his half-brother King Henry to marry an extremely wealthy English widow, Isabel de Warenne, 4th Countess of Surrey. Young Hamelin was delighted to accept this invitation, even to the extent of adopting the lady’s Warenne name. Consequently, in a flash, the French bastard child became Hamelin de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. 

The couple had several daughters, one of whom was the above-mentioned Suzanne de Warenne, who jumped into the royal bed of her cousin King John and gave birth to my ancestor Richard Chilham. And I have just discovered that, in 1190, her sister Maud (Matilda) de Warenne [1166-1212] married Henri d’Estouteville [1170-1232], lord of Valmont.

This Estouteville/Warenne marriage plays no direct role in my Latton ancestry. That’s to say, the English marriage between Robert de Stuteville and Sibyl de Valognes remains the only explanation I can find for an alleged Estouteville/Latton link. But the Estouteville/Warenne marriage indicates that the French Estouteville family had personal links with ancestors of the Wadham, Stourton and Berkeley families, described in my book. Incidentally, in the context of Hamelin de Warenne, we come upon references to the feudal town of Ambrières in the Mayenne department (mentioned in my book), which played a role in early French Estouteville history.

Registration of a birth in England

Having examined countless BMD records [births, marriages and deaths] in the context of my personal genealogical research, I was delighted to come upon this copy of a quite ordinary birth record, bearing today’s date.

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The informant was the child’s father, who signed the registration simply by means of his given name: William. He and the baby’s mother, Catherine Middleton, have unusual occupations. The father apparently earns his living as a prince of the United Kingdom. And the mother works in the same kind of job, as a princess of the United Kingdom. As the saying goes, it takes all sorts to make a world. As for the offspring, a girl, she was born 3 days ago in a Westminster hospital. I always feel a little sorry for babies born in the middle of big cities. But I realize they're capable of growing up just as happily as us country kids.

They sound like a nice little family. The only thing that upsets me a little is the terribly complicated name they’ve given to the baby, composed of no less than 9 terms: Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana of Cambridge. What I mean to say is that I know a couple who simply named their little female baby Zoé. I reckon they would have been happy with the single letter Z... except that the registry office wouldn't have agreed. But everybody, of course, has different attitudes towards inventing names for babies.

There’s another minor detail, of a puzzling nature. I’m incapable of fathoming out the family’s simple surname. Concerning the mother, there’s no problem: she was a Middleton. On the other hand, the father’s surname is hard to define. But that’s neither here nor there. I may have already said that it takes all kinds to make a world.

Yvonne Skyvington [1919-2015]

My paternal aunt Yvonne Elizabeth Skyvington was born at the Hillcrest Hospital in Rockhampton (Queensland, Australia) on May 1, 1919. She died at Taree (NSW) on Sunday evening, April 12, 2015.

After an in-depth career in nursing, Yvonne married Reginald Tarrant, and they had three children: Lynne (married name Greenlees), Roger (deceased) and Glenn (married name McMurrich).

The death of my dear aunt (with whom I was in constant contact during the writing of They Sought the Last of Lands, Gamone Press, 2014) means that I am henceforth the senior member of the 19th-century branch of the Skivington family, from the Dorset village of Shroton (also known as Iwerne Courtney), who spelt their name as “Skyvington”.

Pathetic end of a pioneering era

I don’t know whether many of my compatriots have ever heard of a NSW rural township named Breeza. Here’s a wonderful photo of the Breeza landscape from Ian Stehbens:

Breeza is surely one of the loveliest names you could possibly imagine for a hot flat place out on the Liverpool Plains. One imagines sea breezes floating in magically from the distant Pacific! I heard this name constantly during my childhood, because my grandmother Kathleen Pickering [1889-1964] was born in nearby Quirindi and brought up in Breeza, on a sheep station named Currabubula. What fabulous place names! If you’ve got a map—or, better still, Google—you’ll find that the municipalities named Breeza and Currabubula lie in the middle of a triangle whose corners are Gunnedah, Tamworth and Quirindi.

I’ve just published (through Gamone Press) a family-history book, They Sought the Last of Lands, presenting pioneering stories of my Australian ancestors.

If you’re interested, I invite you to click here to download the chapter in which I speak of my grandmother from Breeza.

Now, some of the few remaining flimsy threads that tie me to my native land are about to be destroyed forever. A Chinese company named Shenhua has apparently received approval from the NSW state government to build a gigantic coal mine on the agricultural lands of the Liverpool Plains near my ancestral township of Breeza. Astounded and shocked by such a scenario, I hardly know what to say.

Australia is selling off to China

 the lands and spirits of her pioneers.

The souls of my ancestors.

Click here and here for press stuff on this unfolding tragedy.

Meanwhile, as usual Down Under, where life is casual, nobody seems to give a coal-mine fuck. Is our Australian people really as apathetic and indeed pathetic as that? Yes, no doubt. I would love to be contradicted...

Escaping from DNA detection

Over the last month or so, in the context of my work on a future book about Gamone, I’ve been investigating haphazardly and half-heartedly the genealogy of various local families, just to obtain (if possible) a slightly less fuzzy idea of who’s who. At one point, I happened to say to one of our female municipal representatives that it would be an interesting idea if some of the people here were to carry out DNA-testing, in order to gain a better understanding of the evolution of certain time-honored families. It was if I had suggested that they should grab a shotgun and fire at their feet.

In my enthusiasm for science and technology in general, and for genetics in particular, it’s true that I often tend to forget that many of my fellow citizens look upon DNA analysis as some kind of necessarily evil. For them, it belongs to the morbid category of crime detection, forensic tests, unsolved murders, Big Brother… At a less dramatic level, DNA analysis is likely to land you in trouble when it reveals that you’re not really the individual you thought you were, and that your alleged biological ancestors weren’t exactly the individuals they claimed to be. Eons of prehistoric experiences have taught us that there’s no point in waking up sleeping dogs. There are things that are better left unknown. And how might a genealogist such as myself disagree? Click here for a summary of a sleeping dog that was rudely awakened in our Skyvington household, recently, by DNA analysis.

Maybe, therefore, we should look into ways of protecting ourselves from the inevitably nasty consequences of DNA testing. Click here to see an imaginative video on this theme.

Why doesn’t a bright scientist simply invent a gadget (maybe a smartphone app) that would simply neutralize our personal DNA, turning it off (a little like unsubscribing from a Facebook account), so that nobody—not even Islamic jihadists or North Koreans—would be capable of attacking us?

Happy Winter Solstice greetings to all of my friends
in the Northern Hemisphere,
and complementary Summer Solstice greetings
to those in the Antipodes.

Might I have Viking blood?

It's hard to imagine that a quiet and well-behaved old-timer like me might evoke the possibility of his Viking ancestry. Besides, I can’t really vouch for the authenticity of this nice old family portrait—of an ancient ancestor named Sven, on a beach outing with his mates—that was handed down to me by relatives in the Old Country.

Vikings were intrepid adventurers, who were afraid of nothing and nobody… which is not exactly my personal case. Some of them were seafarers who finally settled on the continental shores of the English Channel (like my son François, who is considerably more Viking than I am). On the other hand, the idea of a Viking living in a place like Choranche would be a bit like Nicolas Sarkozy moving into a monastery, and Carla entering a nunnery. (The ex-president has screwed up his return to politics in such a way that my image is maybe not as crazy as it might appear.)

Genealogical research is often similar to science in that we imagine such-and-such a scenario, and then persevere in believing that our speculations might be valid. That’s to say, we only abandon our scenario when we discover that something in our speculations simply doesn’t add up… whereupon we drop it all immediately, like a proverbial load of shit. And there aren’t even any sentimental thanks for the memories. Scientific research is a harsh business. No matter how much poetry was conveyed by the lovely old concept of an omnipresent ubiquitous ether permeating all the infinitesimal interstices of the universe, this theory was trashed instantly and forever as soon as the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, designed to record the existence of ether-drift, returned negative results. In genealogy, of course, we’re light years away from experimental physics, but family-history research and scientific research both necessitate the invention of imaginative yet plausible speculations. And such speculations are “born to die” in the sense that they must be discarded as soon as they no longer correspond to known facts. So, we advance through generations of better and better speculations, while burning all our poorly-built bridges behind us.

For the moment, therefore, I persist in speculating that our Skeffington patriarch in Leicestershire had come across the English Channel from Normandy in the wake of Duke William’s invasion.

Click the YouTube icon to watch a better presentation

I’ve investigated several theories in an attempt to ascertain the surname of this fellow’s family back in Normandy, but I’ve never been able to obtain any firm facts. Let me invent a plausible name for this Norman ancestor: Sven de Cotentin. I would imagine that Sven lived with his wife and children in the vicinity, say, of the modern town of Coutances. They probably led a simple but quite comfortable rural existence in Normandy, enabling Sven and his family to become candidates for settlement in the captured land on the other side of the English Channel.

I’ve always been intrigued by two obvious questions:

1 — When Sven left for England, did he leave any relatives back in Normandy?

2 — Back in Normandy, what was Sven’s family-history background?

As far as the first question is concerned, we might imagine that Sven had brothers or cousins (on his paternal side) who had not wished to move across to England, because they were happy with their life in Normandy. Going one step further, we might find that descendants of these folk exist today in France, maybe still in Normandy. If this were the case, then we can imagine that these people might decide to carry out DNA tests, in which case our Y-chromosomes would match. Alas, in the online Y-chromosome database, I've never yet come upon a living Frenchman whose data looks anything like mine. For this and other reasons, I tend to believe that the probable answer to that first question is negative. If Sven were sufficiently motivated to move across to England, then his male relatives would have surely been equally enthusiastic about this project… unless, of course, they owned valuable properties in Normandy.

Concerning the second question, it’s perfectly possible that Sven’s ancestors were Vikings (like the ancestors of Duke William himself) who had arrived in the Cotentin region during the 9th century, and decided to settle down there. As for their wives, they may well have been local Gallic girls. This speculation leads us to imagine that Sven’s Viking ancestor might have left male relatives back in Scandinavia, and that descendants of these folk might exist today in a land such as Sweden, Norway or Denmark.

Two days ago, I performed one of my regular searches in the Y-chromosome database. As of a couple of months ago, I’ve had a single match, with the Englishman Hugh Courtenay, an oddly-named grandson of my rogue great-grandfather William Skyvington [1868-1959], described here. Well, the name of a new match has just appeared in this Y-chromosome database. Here’s my current summary:

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The Swedish lady who recently submitted this data—on behalf of her husband’s maternal uncle named Sven-Erik Johansson—has promised to send me the complete set of 67 marker values as soon as they’re available. Incidentally, the earliest known ancestor of Sven-Erik Johansson was a certain Sven Nilsson Durmin [1709-1780]. I'm awaiting explanations from the lady concerning the apparent change in surname.

For the moment, as you can see, my match with Sven-Erik Johansson is based upon a subset of 30 markers, and the so-called “genetic distance” (the difference between our respective values) is 2, which is the same as my distance from the Courtenay values (for 37 markers). Obviously, my excitement is premature, since the Johansson/Skyvington genetic distance might explode beyond acceptable bounds when we obtain the remaining 37 values. But I take advantage of this delay in order to revel in the idea (maybe only momentarily) that I might at last be sailing in the wake of our Viking…

My second family-history book

This morning, the postwoman brought me a first copy (from the printer in the UK) of They Sought the Last of Lands, which can be thought of as a companion volume to A Little Bit of Irish.

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I’m more than satisfied with the result.

Farewell to family history

It’s 2 o’clock in the morning, and I’ve just finished uploading the files of They Sought the Last of Lands to the IngramSpark platform in England. Here’s the cover, which I created this evening:

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There don’t seem to be any technical errors in my files (which are automatically verified by the IngramSpark robot as soon as they’ve been uploaded), so the book should be published very soon. Finally, with the index, it’s 384 pages long, whereas A Little Bit of Irish was only 266 pages long.

As of tomorrow, I’ll be packing up all my family-history archives and storing them away. It’s a funny feeling to think that this lengthy adventure is now terminated… except, of course, for my Skeffington One-Name Study, which will be not be a personal family-history document in the same sense as the first two books, but rather a kind of historical monograph.

In fact this Skeffington book is no longer the exciting challenge that it appeared to be when I first started looking into genealogy, many years ago. To be perfectly honest, I’m not particularly motivated by this Skeffington project, because I know already that this future book is unlikely to satisfy lots of people throughout the world who received the Skeffington surname in circumstances that I’m not capable of explaining. The only reason why I intend to continue this one-name study is that I now possess such a complete collection of documents on ancient Skeffington history that it would be a pity not to take advantage of them.

Above all, I continue to hope that a certain number of male individuals with our surname will end up providing Y-chromosome data, which remains the only sound method for discovering who’s who… as we’ve just seen in the context of the Courtenay Affair.

Chromosomes reveal the truth

Initially, Old Bailey was the name of a London street...

Four years ago, in a blog post entitled Family-history shock [display], I described my chance discovery of this record of a trial at London’s Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey.

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The trial had taken place on 24 October 1898. A man named William Skyvington, said to be 26 years old, had been charged with

feloniously forging and uttering an endorsement on an order for the payment of one pound, three shillings and eleven pence, with intent to defraud.

The accused man had pleaded guilty, and he was sent to jail for six months’ hard labour.

Here’s an old photo of one of the courts at the Old Bailey where criminal trials for London and Middlesex were held.

The accused individual was placed in the dock on the left. The jury was seated in the box on the far side, below a pair of large windows. On a throne beneath the wooden canopy on the right, alongside a sword of justice, an alderman (sometimes the lord mayor himself) represented the city of London, whereas the judge, sheriff and trial recorder were seated at plain desks in the far corner.

I wondered immediately if the criminal might have been my great-grandfather William Jones Skyvington [born in 1868, and therefore almost 30 years old at the time of the trial].

Four months ago, in a blog post entitled White lies of men in love [display], I explained that an English lady named Nicola Courtenay had sent me an e-mail indicating that her grandfather William Courtenay [who had died in 1959] often used “Skyvington” as if it were one of his given names. Since this “Skyvington” name is rather uncommon (resulting from a 19th-century spelling mistake that replaced a letter “i” by “y”), I was greatly intrigued by Nicola’s news of somebody having, as it were, “borrowed” our surname and used it as an aditional given name. The story simply didn’t add up. Above all, several clues in Nicola’s tale evoked authentic details associated with my great-grandfather. So, I was automatically tempted to speculate that Nicola’s grandfather and my great-grandfather might have been one and the same individual.

Well, to cut a long story short, a Y-chromosome test carried out on a DNA saliva specimen from a living male member of the Courtenay family has just proved scientifically (with no room whatsoever for doubt) that this was indeed the case. In other words, after vanishing from the northern-London context in which his son—my future grandfather Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985]—was born, William apparently decided to adopt the “Courtenay” surname, invent a fictitious identity (in which he claimed to be a member of the ancient and noble family of the Earl of Devon from Powderham Castle) and raise a large family.

Insofar as this Courtenay Affair provides us with specimens of William Skyvington’s apparent tendency towards mythomania, I am now convinced that the individual convicted at the Old Bailey in 1898 was indeed my great-grandfather. Besides, I had reached that conclusion prior to meeting up with the Courtenay Affair purely through the perusal of genealogical archives.

This morning, I retrieved a document from the National Archives designated as a calendar of prisoners, which mentioned the trial and imprisonment of William Skyvington. Here is the cover page:

An index includes the name of William Skyvington followed by the letters NL, meaning North London:

For the moment, I’ve been unable to determine (while awaiting clarifications from the National Archives) whether this means that William came from North London, or that he was now detained in a jail in North London. Further on in the document, we find the actual reecord of the trial.

It contains several interesting elements of information that did not appear in the Old Bailey record that I found 4 years ago. William was a “traveller”: that’s to say, a commercial traveler or salesman who moved around to contact customers. The term “well” means (as explained on the cover page) that William could read and write well. Above all, I learnt that he was jailed in Pentonville Prison in Islington (North London).

That’s to say, William Skyvington was placed in a prison just to the south of the family home in Evershot Road, not to mention Finsbury Park, his son’s vast playground. Star-shaped Pentonville was thought of as a “modern” jail, because it had been designed in the early 1840s by skilled carceral engineers.

But it was surely a nasty place.

Besides, William had been condemned to so-called hard labor, which meant that he had to toil daily at heavy manual tasks. Amazingly, we have here a photo of such inmates at Pentonville:

Then there’s a ballad sung by Pete Waters, with a catching refrain:

I was sent off for trial at the Bailey

And remanded to Pentonville Jail

The situation is funny (weird). For ages, I had concluded that, if I wanted to enhance my family-history writing with melancholy ballads about the hardships of a convict's existence, it was in New South Wales that I would find such stuff, in the context of my maternal ancestors from Ireland... and certainly not in the refined English context of the Skyvingtons.

Today, I must admit that the tables of my genealogical temple have been upturned. And I can't even blame Jesus...

Genealogical pilgrimages

My highfalutin title simply designates touristic travel excursions motivated by family-history interests. So, a good example of a genea-pilgrimage (as I shall call them) was the recent visit of my niece Indiya to places in northern London, described in my blog post entitled Looking back on a London century [display]. And I hope I’m not being pretentious in imagining that the publication of my two family-history books, A Little Bit of Irish and They Sought the Last of Lands, might end up increasing the popularity of genea-pilgrimages in the context of my family and relatives.

Obviously, since neither of my books has been written in the spirit of a tourist guide, the steps involved in moving from the books to down-to-earth excursion plans would necessitate some work. Well, I’ve been thinking that maybe I have the personal responsibility of facilitating this work in one way or another. After all, I’ve had a minimum of experience in the domain of tourist guidebooks, through my Great Britain Today [Jeune Afrique, Paris, 1978].

Let’s refer to such an excursion plan as a Genea-Pilgrimage Guide (GPG). Maybe I’ll place such GPGs in the webspaces that have housed, up until now, the PDF files of the chapters of my family-history books.

Looking back on a London century

A century separates these two photos taken at exactly the same spot in a northern neighborhood of London.

The older lady was Martha Watson [1837-1915], while the young woman is Martha’s great-great-great-granddaughter Indiya Taylor, born in Australia. The following chart indicates that Martha’s married name was Mepham (which was loaded onto my unfortunate father as a second given name):

The second child, Eliza Jane Mepham, married a certain William Skyvington, as indicated in the following chart:

Their only child, Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985], went out to Australia in 1908 on a steamship named the Marathon.

Ernest, who was Indiya’s great-grandfather, became a prosperous businessman in Grafton (NSW), where he started up the Ford automobile dealership.

He once revisited the Old World and his native London in the company of his daughter Yvonne. In Paris, my wife Christine asked Pop (as we called him) to name the place that had most impressed him during his world tour. His reply: “Burleigh Heads.” That was the town on Queensland’s Gold Coast where he had been living in retirement for a decade or so. Pop had a great sense of humor, and that was his way of telling us that there’s no place like home. But the address that Indiya tracked down a few days ago was indeed Pop’s true home throughout his adolescence in London.

With technical assistance that I had obtained from historical authorities in London, Indiya was able to discover the quiet dead-end section of Mount Pleasant Crescent (called Mount Pleasant Road in Pop’s time) where the old Mepham house is currently numbered 72.

I’m amused by the symbolic aspects of the following photo, in which my lovely niece appears to be narrowing down her search for origins, while looking back upon a London century.

Incidentally, I should have normally published by now my genealogical book that talks about our London origins (amongst many other aspects of our family history). Its cover will look like this:

Publication is delayed, however, by fascinating last-minute news that I mentioned briefly in my recent post entitled White lies of men in love [display]. The potential “white liar” in question is the man whose name appears in the upper left-hand corner of the second chart: my great-grandfather William Skyvington. I’m hoping that the friends who have kindly revealed this curious affair—the Courtenay family in the UK—will be convinced that the only way of elucidating this enigma is to call upon modern science: namely, a Y-chromosome genealogical test.

White lies of men in love

In the context of my genealogical research, I was intrigued, if not amused, by the behavior of my ancestor Charles Walker [1807-1860], probably a Scottish Protestant, who maintained that he was an Irish Catholic, ostensibly in order to be able to wed a 17-year-old Tipperary nymph, 15 years his junior. Religion can't compete with sexual passion!

Recently, on the side of my paternal grandmother, I heard of the astonishing case of John Pickering [1851-1926] who decided to call himself "John Latton", enabling him to wed a new wife (while holding on to the original one) and to create an entire parallel family.

Yet another case of this kind was brought to my attention, unexpectedly, a couple of days ago. Here’s the only photo I have of Devon-born William Skyvington [born in 1868], my paternal great-grandfather.

And here’s a photo of William’s son, my future grandfather Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985], in his general store in the Queensland outback.

Whenever I quizzed my grandfather about what might have happened to his father, he had no clear answers… apart from suggesting that William Skyvington may have died in World War I. Needless to say, I found that answer unsatisfactory, because my great-grandfather would have normally been too old to get enlisted as a soldier. So, I concluded that we would probably never know what had happened to him.

Yesterday afternoon, I received an astonishing e-mail from a lady whose maiden name was Nicola Courtenay. She told me that the second given name of her grandfather was somewhat strange. He called himself “William Skyvington Courtenay”. After examining the bits of data that Nicola had included in her e-mail, I realized beyond any doubt whatsoever that her alleged Courtenay ancestor was in fact my great-grandfather. In other words, after the premature death of his wife (my great-grandmother) in London, William Skyvington had succeeded in convincing a young woman—his future bride—that he was a descendant of the celebrated Courtenay family: the Earls of Devon. Clearly, William had fallen in love, and he took the liberty of inventing this white lie to make sure that he would capture his beloved female. Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it…

For a family historian, the annoying aspect of such identity changes is that there’s no obvious way of searching for them or even detecting their existence. There's no other method of discovering such an identity change than to receive an unexpected message from a total stranger. And shortly after such a contact, the “total stranger” has suddenly become one of your closest relatives, and an excellent friend. What a silly idea to imagine that genealogy is a matter of fossicking around among tombstones!

My mother's birthday

I must admit that I tend to talk and think as if everybody in the universe has been enthralled by Kurt Vonnegut [1922-2007] in general and his eye-opening novel Deadeye Dick (1983) in particular. Maybe they have, and I simply haven’t noticed…

Employing Vonnegut talk, I celebrate today the fact that the peephole of my dear mother Enid Kathleen Walker [1918-2003] opened exactly 96 years ago, on January 19, 1918. Here’s a lovely studio portrait of Kath when she was two years old:

If ever it could be said that one’s date of birth is “chosen” (how, and by whom?), then the least I can say is that the occult forces of the universe chose a crazy date for the opening of my mother’s peephole, in the year of the end of the Great War. I find it fascinating to be able to throw a simple argument at Google, such as the date of my mother’s birth [display], and to discover everything that was happening at that moment in the past.

In the posthumous celebration of my mother’s birthday, the best man at the party is surely Wikipedia. And all I can hope is that he’ll be constantly in attendance at my own future birthday celebrations…

Cover for my book on maternal genealogy

Up until now, I’ve been using the following cover for the typescript of my book on maternal genealogy, soon to be published by Gamone Press.

I’ve always been aware that this dull cover (based upon a Xmas card sent to me, 33 years ago, by an Australian uncle) was a temporary thing, and that it would need to be replaced, sooner or later, by a more attractive design. This morning, I created a couple of possible models for the cover, making use of Australian images that I can purchase (for some 50 euros) in high-resolution format (300 dots per inch).

Click to enlarge

In both cases, I’ve used the metaphor of a rural road, symbolizing, as it were, the paths of my pioneering ancestors in Braidwood and the Clarence River region. An observer can no doubt guess that "my mother's people" came from Ireland, but we cannot know, of course, what lies ahead, beyond the crest of the hill. A little bit of greenness by the roadside reinforces the title (without seeking to “explain” it, since there are several subtle reasons for my choice of this title).

You might say that the left-hand maquette is classical, whereas the right-hand maquette is more “modern”. I would appreciate any reactions to these models.

FIRST REACTION: Each new blog post that I publish gives rise automatically to a Twitter message from my @Skyvington account. And that's how I received my first reaction, from a friendly Canadian woman, Diane Rogers, whom I thank greatly.

SECOND REACTION: And here's another Twitter vote in favor of the right-hand model, from a Skeffington lady in Scotland. I thank her very much.

VARIATIONS: It's not all that easy to submit variations that might respect the suggestions of critics. Here, for example, is a version of the right-hand cover with a totally different typography:

The title—A Little Bit of Irish—is certainly highlighted here, and the readability of the cover text is surely maximal, but I have the impression that the heavy typography is being shoved down our throats. I prefer the lightweight style of the initial version with its intriguing font. To be honest, though, I simply don't know how artistically-gifted critics (that's not my case) end up evaluating questions of this kind. So, please, help !