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This is the main page for my own family history. The downward links here contain all the surviving documentary and photographic records of my parents and grandparents, together with whatever I can recall having been told about them.
Most of the documents reproduced here were scanned in from stuff I found in dusty boxes in my attic. While doing this, it occurred to me that this material probably has a better chance of survival on the internet than in the attic. I therefore decided to call these pages my "virtual attic."
(Having lit on that idea, my next thought was of course to get a column out of it.)
The material is divided up into the five categories shown in the navigation box:
- People—All the family members I know of, with as much as I know about each one.
- Photographs—Such as survive from old family albums.
- Places—The places where my family members lived.
- Letters—All the letters that have survived from deceased family members (mainly from my parents to me).
- Other Documents—Any documents other than letters, e,g, marriage certificates, diaries.
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I come from lines of ordinary English working people. My cousin Harold played for Wolverhampton Wanderers, a first-division English soccer team, in the 1950s. One of my mother's mother's antecedents was said to have been governor of Strangeways Prison in Manchester in the early or mid 19th century. That is about as close to distinction as any of us has got.
An even mistier family legend, also from my mother's mother's line, has it that one of our ancestors was a grand Spanish lady, who came over to England with a shipload of servants: "...and that is how we come to have brown eyes," ends the tale. I have no idea whether this is true. Since, if you go back a few centuries, the rules of arithmetic show that everybody is descended from everybody, I don't see why it shouldn't be.
The surname "Derbyshire" (pronounced "DAH-bi-shuh") is a locative, the name of an English county. Like all locatives, it arose when people from that place were living in some other place. ("English" is a common Irish surname, on the same principle.) The assignment was presumably made back in the 15th century, when English commoners acquired surnames. At any rate, I have no knowledge of any connections with Derbyshire, a place I have been to only twice, on business both times. Most Derbyshires come, like my father, from south Lancashire. Of all English towns of any size, I think Wigan has the highest proportion of Derbyshires.
Variant spellings ("Darbyshire," "Darbishire," etc.) are common. So far as I know, there have been no really eminent Derbyshires. There is a John Derbyshire in Book II of Jan Morris's Pax Britannica, but he does not seem to have been much of an empire builder. A Manchester-born John Henry Derbyshire won Olympic medals for swimming in the early 1900s. The only instance in fiction that I am aware of is Jennings's side-kick (spelt "Darbishire") in the school stories of Anthony Buckeridge, though "Derbyshire" is used as a pseudonym in the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze."
My mother's maiden name, Knowles, is also a locative, cognate with the word "knoll," whose roots go back through Old English to Old Teutonic. To complete the set, the Chinese surnames of my wife's father and mother, Qi (Æë) and Han (º«), are also locatives. They are the names of fiefs bestowed on descendants of early Zhou Dynasty monarchs in the 11th to 9th centuries B.C. Their locations and boundaries can be inspected on page 5 of Hermann's Historical Atlas of China, and they have entries in Wikipedia here and here.