My Family Trees

  I may have been born in Yorkshire, as was my father, and his father before him, but my genes belong in Exeter, Devon's County Town. I lived in the City from 1965 until 1973, arriving when I was six and leaving when I was almost fifteen. My dad worked at Higher Barracks in Howell Road, and my mum was a GPO Telephonist at the main exchange by Rougemont Castle. I went to St Nicholas Catholic Primary School when it was still in Holloway Street, then onto Hele's, up in Quarry Lane. We lived on the big Countess Wear council estate and I spent my formative years there, plying football on the Sheep Field and fishing in the canal at the swing bridge on the old by-pass. My dad was posted to Belgium with his work, and when we came back to the UK I went to live and work in London, although my parents eventually found their way back to Devon, and settled in Exmouth. I always knew that my mum's family hailed from Exeter, although she herself was a native of Torquay, and my excursion in...

  I recently stumped up a pile of cash and spat in a tube, all in the interests of having my DNA analysed by the good people at Ancestry.com/ca/co.uk. I think it's a relief to me that there was nothing unusual in the results. The test shows that I hail mostly from the UK (Yorkshire and Devon they said, which is spot on), and about a quarter from Ireland, all of which is completely accurate given that I know my family history. Being largely from north eastern parts of England, I also have a smattering of Scandinavian DNA, so that's a big thanks to all those marauders and conquerors that ravaged that part of the country, yes stand up Erik the Viking!  The list of people the test results offered that were likely related to me was quite interesting. Only one was known to me, the daughter of a first cousin, but the rest I'd never heard of, and they were all second or third cousins at best. I'm fairly certain that I won't be contacting anyone, but I'm sort of hoping t...

 When I started this family tree thing, little did I know that the Mayne family reach was global. Well, the British Empire and the former British colony of the United States of America, anyway. I had thought that as my father, grandfather and great-grandfather all hailed from Leeds in Yorkshire then that was as far as we were likely to go. Then I was contacted by a cousin, a distant cousin admittedly, from the USA. I had no idea that I had any relatives in the USA beyond my uncle who moved there in 1970, but here was my cousin from a distant land (well, given that I now live in Canada, not that distant at all, really) letting me in on the data for my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Mayne (1810-1871). Thomas was born in Leeds and died in Leeds, but in 1822 one of his brothers, Henry Collins Mayne (1796-1850), and his wife Anna Mary Hester Robinson (1800-1842), boarded a ship in Liverpool and sailed to New York. From there they made their way to Loudoun County in Virginia, and starte...