Money Laundering in the Kitchen

Tracy Lowe was surprised to learn that her great-grandfather Alexander Menday was convicted of manslaughter, but not surprised that he had run-ins with the law.

She was ... familiar with the tale of how her grandmother had come home one day to find her kitchen decked out with improvised washing lines from which were hanging numerous soggy banknotes.

Menday, a Thames waterman at the time, had the job of recovering bodies from the river, and he and his son had relieved an unfortunate of the contents of his pockets before the authorities arrived - on the basis he didn't have any more use for them.

"We knew they were rogues, the sort of people you would cross the street to avoid," says Tracy. [Link]

They Abhorred Hoarding

Model Jodie Kidd's great-grandfather was a shipping tycoon and a baronet. He was also a convicted food hoarder.

In the final year of the Great War the Government introduced strict food rationing. Food cards were issued to everyone, including the King and the hoarding of food had become a serious offence carrying heavy penalties.

The Tyne and Wear Archives holds Gosforth Urban District Council records and specifically those of the Gosforth Local Food Control Committee 1917-1919, including the Profiteering Committee minutes, which details the conviction of one Rowland Frederick William Hodge for food hoarding in 1918.

Chief archivist Liz Rees explains: “We weren’t aware of the scandal. We knew his name and we knew that the shipyard had closed but we didn’t know the story behind it.” [Link]

Average Age of Kiwis Goes Up

Eric King-Turner, 102, has moved from Britain to New Zealand—his wife's homeland—making him that country's oldest immigrant.

"It's a wonderful new adventure and I would say to anyone that if you want to do something you should do it straight away while you can. What's important is that when I'm 105 I don't want to be thinking 'I wish I had moved to the other side of the world when I was 102'."

Mrs King-Turner met her husband, both widowed, while researching her ancestry. Despite sharing the same last name they were not related but decided to meet anyway. [Link]

Sure, you let one of them in, and then another, and pretty soon the whole damn country is overrun by centenarians.

The 'son' Rose in the North

A University of Leicester study finds that surnames ending in "son" came from northern England, while names ending in "s" came from the south.

They discovered that nearly 60 per cent of northerners in villages such as Crosby, Ravensworth and Patterdale had a "son" surname in the seventeenth century.

Dr Dave Postles, from the University of Leicester's English department, said: "Looking from the outside, it will be noticeable to people that the 'north' of England is a place where surnames ending in 'son' have predominated, although they have spread more widely now.

"Whereby somebody in the North would be called Williamson in the South they would be called William or Williams." [Link]

Salford's Sioux

Excavations for a new BBC building in Salford, England, may turn up the burial site of a Sioux warrior.

The 120-year-old mystery of the whereabouts of the final resting place of the 6ft 7ins brave known as `Surrounded by the Enemy' may lie under Salford Quays. The horseman, a member of the Oglala Lakota Warriors of South Dakota, died during a visit to Salford with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1887/8.

Local councillor Steve Coen says there may be living proof of Native American presence in Salford.

"It is very possible that there may be descendants as they were here for a long time and they were certainly very friendly with the local population."

One Sioux baby was born in Salford and was baptised in St Clement's Church before slipping out of the history books. [Link]

How the English Evolved

While researching his new book, A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark wondered if the descendants of English people who survived disasters like the Black Death gained, through natural selection, a greater resistance to disease. This greater immunity, he supposed, might help explain how the Industrial Revolution came about.

In support of the disease-resistance idea, cities like London were so filthy and disease ridden that a third of their populations died off every generation, and the losses were restored by immigrants from the countryside. That suggested to Dr. Clark that the surviving population of England might be the descendants of peasants.

A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, but in quite the opposite direction to what he had expected.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded. [Link]

As the wealthy dropped in social status, says Clark, they passed down (culturally, or perhaps genetically) their capitalist values to the workforce that drove the Industrial Revolution.

Most of my ancestors sat out the Industrial Revolution, and, in light of my life of abject poverty, I'm guessing I lack the capitalism gene. I'm well suited for serfdom.

It's Time for Him to Shove Off

Eric King-Turner and his wife are moving to New Zealand next January. At 102, he may be Britain's oldest emigrant.

Says Eric: "We not only had to produce a marriage certificate but we had to produce evidence that we were in a long and stable relationship!"

Eric says he was not asked about his age but had to show that he could support himself financially in New Zealand. [Link]

Standish Home Damaged by Yobs

The ancestral home of one of the Pilgrims is in dire need of a makeover.

The 17th century lodge at Duxbury Park, off Bolton Road, has been neglected for years, and yobs have smashed windows, scrawled graffiti on the walls and started fires.

The lodge, a former coach house and an ancient barn are all that remain of the ancestral home of the Standish family.

Their most famous son Myles Standish, born 1587, became the military captain of the Pilgrims and was one of the first settlers to land in America. [Link]

Skinning Dogs and Farming Gunge

Emily Cockayne's new book, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770, is now sullying bookstore shelves.

It was a muddy, desperate world of licentious fustilugs, determined dog-skinners, essential gunge-farmers, and rootling "piggs," of dissolute rakehells, and the drabs who serviced them, a world of urban dunghills and city "hog-styes," a world inhabited by people marked by tetters, morphew, "psorophtalmy" (eyebrow dandruff, since you ask), and pocky itch, and clothed in grogram tailored by botchers. If you suspect that one of the many pleasures of "Hubbub" is the exuberant vocabulary that so enriches the texts cited by its author, you'd be right. [Link]

A November-December Romance

This item appeared in Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly in 1888, written by someone who never knew the love of an 80-year-old woman.

A CURIOUS MARRIAGE ENTRY

The Rev. Brooks Lambert, the Vicar of Greenwich, has disinterred and sent to the London Times a very curious entry in the marriage registers of St. Alphage, Greenwich, under the date November 18th, 1685 :— "John Cooper, of this parish, almsman in Queen Elizabeth's College, aged one hundred and eight years, and Margaret Thomas, of Charlton, in Kent, aged eighty years, by license of ye Lord Bishop of Rochester and leave of ye Governors of ye Draipers' Company."

This marriage must, we should think, have been got up by others than the parties themselves, as a vulgar sort of joke. Even if the ages be a little exaggerated, no sane people of that age would have entered into a tie of this kind on the very brink of the grave. Since the age of Methuselah, there can scarcely have been any such marriage.

Bruce's Landlocked Lineage

I hope Bruce Willis is better at genealogy than geography.

The actor revealed that his ancestors come from Ecton, a village and civil parish in Northamptonshire, England, reports the Mirror.

However, he got a bit confused as to the location of the place, for though he describes it as "a small fishing village in the north of London", it happens to be landlocked. [Link]

His ancestors must have emigrated because the fishing was so poor.

History Swept Under the Rug

Something surprising was found recently under the carpeting of 700-year-old St. Helen's Church in Pinxton, Derbyshire, England.

Churchwarden Stuart Thornley said that the headstones came to light when the carpeting was being replaced.

"It was something of a shock to see them. The carpet had been down for many years and we had no idea that they were there," he said.

"They had obviously been taken from the churchyard and used when the floor was relaid. But we have no idea when the work was done." [Link]

One of the stones mentioned—that of Mary Kelsal—has been there since at least 1891.

One Man's Treasure

Some essential source material for John Bridges's latest book—The Commercial Life of a Suffolk Town: Framlingham Around 1900—was found in seven dusty trash bags stored in a farmer's shed.

Inside were thousands of invoices and receipts - many a bit grubby - that chronicled the fortunes of a rural family business as it moved from the Victorian era to the limbo years between the end of rationing and the dawning of the swinging sixties.

They covered the period from 1882 to 1957, with more than 4,200 bills covering 165 different businesses in the Framlingham area alone. [Link]

Half Were Hangers-On

A DNA study of 100 men named Robson in Northern England proved that only half could claim descent from a common ancestor.

The study revealed 50 volunteers who gave DNA samples could be tracked back to a single male 2000 years ago.

But others could be descended from hangers-on who latched themselves to the powerful Border Reiver family and changed their names as a form of subservience. [Link]

Please Don't Take My Pony

The Imperial War Museum North is looking for relatives of a little girl who sent Lord Kitchener a letter pleading for the life of her pony.

Young Freda Hewlett wrote to the Secretary of State for War begging him not to call up her 17-year-old pony Betty for active duty at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.

She appeals to Kitchener's softer side, pointing out that the pony is in foal, reminding him that her family have already given two horses to the Army while three family members have responded to his famous "Your Country Needs You" poster and joined the Navy as the Great War got under way. [Link]

Boneyard Bunk Beds

An impending shortage of burial space in England and Wales may lead to grave-sharing.

In a technique called "lift and deepen" old graves will be deepened with room for up to six new coffins to be placed on top of the older remains.

Families could refuse permission for their ancestors' graves to be re-used for "at least another generation".

But once the deeper graves have been used once there will be no time constraints on when subsequent bodies are buried in them. [Link]

Will There Be Pillaging?

"Are You A Viking?" is a new exhibition at Jorvik Viking Centre in Coppergate, York—a place that boasts of its "trademark 10th century stench."

This interactive display helps visitors to trace their ancestry by studying archaeological evidence, migration and trading routes, and the development of language and dialects.

You can compare your diet, habits and lifestyle to those of the Vikings, trace the origin of your name and study food, bones and artefacts.

You are met by a Viking trader, wall displays, barrels to test your senses of Viking touch and smell and a computer game to see whether your hair colour, clothes, and favourite foods suggest a link to the Vikings. [Link]

Killer Carried 'Unusual' DNA

British police investigating the killing of a 13-year-old girl in 1964 have identified an "unusual feature" in DNA recovered at the scene of the crime.

The team had identified a number of families in the South Yorkshire area who bore this unusual feature in their DNA. Since that time they have been painstakingly working through these families obtaining details of their family trees and researching relevant individuals from the 60s.

Said Det Insp Sue Hickman: "We are still working through this list and we're grateful to members of the public for their assistance in this line of enquiry. We have been greatly helped by people undertaking their own research into their extended family to try and make things easier for us." [Link]

He Knew How to Write a Good Curse

The curse that William Shakespeare had engraved on his tomb ("Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,/ To digg the dust encloased heare./ Bleste be y^e man y^t spares thes stones,/ And curst be he y^t moves my bones.") actually worked.

Philip Schwyzer, a senior lecturer at Exeter University, said: "Shakespeare had an unusual obsession with burial and a fear of exhumation. The stern inscription on the slab has been at least partially responsible for the fact that there have been no successful projects to open the grave."

Anxiety about the mistreatment or exhumation of corpses is found in at least 16 of his 37 plays, with this concern often being more pronounced than the fear of death itself. [Link]

[Photo credit: Shakespeare's cursed grave by James Macdonald]

Longest Liverpudlian Lineage Sought

Liverpool is celebrating its 800th birthday by seeking out the family with the deepest roots in the city.

Anyone living in Merseyside who can prove their family tree goes back further in Liverpool than anyone else will be invited, with three of their relatives, to take pride of place in a once-in-a-century procession through the city on 'Liverpool 800 Day' on August 28th.

Those who trace the earliest Liverpool-born ancestor will also earn the title of 'Liverpool's Oldest Family', as well as a fantastic heritage weekend in the city in October, which includes:

• 2 nights for family of four at Hard Days Night Hotel. The world's first Beatle's concept hotel. (Opens October 2007)
• VIP tour of the prestigious Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool. (October 19 - Jan 13 2008)
• Free annual family membership - two adults and two children - to the National Trust.
• VIP tour of National Trust-owned Beatles childhood homes and related attractions.
• VIP tour of St George's Hall - which re-opens on April 23 2007 after a £23m restoration.
• Free, special-edition copy of 'Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History', by University of Liverpool Press. [Link]

What happens if two or twenty or two-hundred people can trace their lineage back to the same Liverpool resident? Will there be room in Aunt Mimi's kitchen?