All over the world

 

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 into the world of Ancestry.com has certainly confirmed that. All through the nineteenth century, my ancestors lived and worked in what is now known as the West Quarter. Before the clearances of the early twentieth century, and the more recent driving through of the Western Way, they lived in the courts and buildings of Coombe Street, Preston Street, Stepcote Hill, Friar's Gate and Frog Street. They were brewery workers, labourers, and fish hawkers who, I suspect, lived hard and difficult lives.

It's all absolutely fascinating now, but in my younger days when we ran up and down Stepcote Hill, and visited "The House That Moved", I had no idea that my ancestors had lived and died in those very streets. 

But Ancestry.com took me further back. My dad's Yorkshire origins were not quite as I had imagined, because as I traced his family back, it turned out that his relations were Exonians as well, only this time in the eighteenth century. These ancestors were living in Alphington and St. Thomas, outside of the City in those days for sure, but not far from those streets of the West Quarter occupied by my mother's family a few decades later. 

One brave resident of Exeter who bore my family name made his way to Cork in Ireland, married, and then travelled to the great Yorkshire city of Leeds, a place that was expanding exponentially at the start of the nineteenth century. From there he built my Yorkshire roots, his family making their business in the boot, shoe and leather trades that were so common in Leeds.

The family is spread far and wide now, but there are still vestiges left in Exeter and its surrounds, particularly those on my mother's side of the family. But, given that I can claim Exonian beginnings on both my mum's and my dad's side of the family, I think it's fair to say that Exeter is truly the home of my family roots.