If you go back far enough, everyone is related to someone important.

On my father’s side, as I mentioned in the last post, we appear to trace back (via a farm labourer getting a descendant of nobility pregnant out of wedlock) to Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, plus other Scottish and Pictish rulers.

On my mother’s side, we have some fancy ancestors too, if you go back far enough. Attila the Hun, for example, whose ancestry supposedly traces back to Prince Damah of the Huns, born 750 BC. Yes, I was amazed; of course, genealogies that far back are super unreliable, but it’s remarkable that they exist at all. Though Wikipedia remarks: “valid genealogical sources are rare, and there seems to be no verifiable way to trace Attila’s descendants beyond a few generations. This has not stopped many genealogists from attempting to reconstruct a valid line of descent to various medieval rulers.”

On that same side are such people as Amblicus of Apameae in Syria; his descendant Tetratius Proconsul of Treves; Julius Caesar; various kings of the Franks, Lombards and Thuringians; Karl Martel, winner of the Battle of Tours in 732 and grandfather of Charlemagne, who’s also an ancestor via the Scottish side; Bertrade, Princess of Norway; Rollo, Count of Rouen and first Duke of Normandy (an ancestor of William the Conqueror, who, again, is an ancestor on the Scottish side); the literally colourfully named Rhun of the Red Spear; his alleged ancestors Macsen Wledig, also known as Maximus, Western Roman Emperor and the legendary Lludd of the Silver Hand, King of Siluria and of the Tuatha de Danann, who (according to legend) rebuilt London and is the supposed namesake of Ludgate, and whose ancestry is traced back to Aeneas of Latium in 1120 BC and then to the Trojans; Saxon kings like Wiglaf of Mercia; Sir Hugh Bigod, 3rd Earl of Norfolk, one of the sureties of Magna Carta; the gang, you might say, are all here.

They gradually funnel down through Cornish nobility and gentry to the Blewetts, one of whom eventually had a daughter who married a miner named Polglase and emigrated first to Australia sometime between 1847 and 1853, then to New Zealand by 1857 (I’m going off the birthplaces of their children here). By the time her granddaughter Mary Ellen Newport married my great-grandfather “Alfie” Gardner, the son of a bootmaker, who was proud to have been born within the sound of Bow bells (the traditional definition of a Cockney), and who emigrated as a child in the 1870s, the family had come down in the world considerably from the Roman emperors, proconsuls, kings, princesses, dukes, earls and Norman knights.

Mind you, over a period of three thousand years, any family is going to have its ups and downs, right? The daughters of royalty marry nobility, the daughters of nobility marry gentry, the daughters of gentry marry substantial farmers and tradesmen, their daughters marry less successful farmers and tradesmen, their daughters marry labourers. And yes, sometimes they marry up instead, but the whole thing is shaped like a pyramid, meaning there just aren’t as many people to marry at the pointy bit as there are at the base; the average trend is always going to be downwards over the long term. Also, of course everyone (including today’s royal and noble houses) had many commoner ancestors in the same early times. They just have no documentation.

On the other side of the family tree, my father’s side, I found another Cornish family named Bowden (the Cornish seemed to have intermarried with everyone, maybe because of the place’s geographical position, maybe because people came to trade for tin from early times). This one links me back ultimately to Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, via a lot of high-status Jewish people, one of whom married Nebuchadnezzar’s daughter. If you can believe records that far back, which you almost certainly can’t.

Out of curiosity, I tried finding my closest common relative with Queen Elizabeth II. It actually came out on my wife’s side. She is the late queen’s ninth cousin twice removed, via a fellow named Colonel Augustine Warner Jr in the 17th century; one of his daughters is my wife’s ancestor, and another is Queen Elizabeth’s (through her mother).

Now the disclaimers, and they are several and large. Firstly, this data is all coming from familysearch, which is run by the LDS Church largely so that people can be baptised for their ancestors, and so there’s a perverse incentive to find a noble ancestor (who will give you a much larger number of ancestors, since better records were kept of the nobility), even if you have to be a bit generous with your assumptions about which specific one of several people with the same name is your ancestor. I haven’t checked every link in this enormous chain, obviously. I’ve noticed that when I try to trace my less distinguished ancestors, I either get lost in generations of men with the same names as their fathers (almost always only one forename, and that usually a common one), or the records just give out, usually sometime in the 18th century. If you don’t hit someone with a long pedigree in a relatively small number of generations, you’re out of luck.

Secondly, the lines of descent further back are inherently unreliable, by the nature of medieval approaches to factuality and the tendency of powerful people (or people in general) to inflate their resumes. Wikipedia warns: “In European genealogy, a descent from antiquity (DFA or DfA) is a proven unbroken line of descent between specific individuals from ancient history and people living today. Ancestry can readily be traced back to the Early Middle Ages, but beyond that, tracing to historical figures from antiquity is impractical due to insufficient documentation of the ancestry of the predominantly new royal and noble families of the period. Though the subject of ongoing effort, no well-researched, historically-documented generation-by-generation genealogical descents are known to exist in Europe… No European DFA is accepted as established.”

Finally, if you go back far enough, everyone is related to everyone anyway. I mentioned in a post on my writing blog a while back the theory of statistician Joseph Chang, which is that anyone who lived long enough ago and is the ancestor of anyone is eventually the ancestor of everyone. Of course I’m descended from Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and Attila the Hun; so is everyone else whose ancestry traces back to Western Europe, assuming that those men have any living descendants at all.

It’s just fun to see it laid out on a tree, that’s all. Even if a lot of it is probably fictional.

When I first started looking into my genealogy on familysearch, I was at first pleased, and then suspicious, to discover a line of descent that traced back to such famous Scottish rulers as William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, along with other Scottish and Pictish kings going back a thousand years or more. How, I wondered, did all these fancy people end up in my family tree, when I knew that my father’s side of the family (which this was) were so blue-collar that they practically didn’t have collars at all? His father, who drove a train, had one of the more skilled and prestigious jobs in that whole side of the family. My father himself, partly through his service in World War II, was able to attend university, earned a Master’s degree in history, spent 30 years as a head of department at the prestigious Auckland Grammar School, and was well known in his lifetime as a successful sports historian. But his ancestors were a distinctly working-class lot.

Well, mystery solved, I think. The connection to all the earls and lairds and kings and what-have-you is all through one woman, Helen Ralston (1796-1867), who married a substantial farmer named Duncan McGeachy in 1817. She was still running the farm as at the 1861 census, the census-taker noting, “Farmer 200 Ac[res] Emp[loying] 2 Men”. (Was Duncan still alive? His record on familysearch says he died in either 1900 (unlikely, as he would have been 103, but not impossible in my long-lived family) or 1890, but he isn’t on the 1861 census record, and I can’t see any source documentation for either death date. Official records for this area seem a bit thin on the ground in general.)

Helen’s daughter Barbara (1840-1921), the last of nine children, born when her mother was already over 40, married my great-great-grandfather Colin McMillan (1833-1938) on 26 April 1859, when she was about 19 and he was just short of 26. His occupation is given on the marriage record as “farm servant”.

But the key thing is this: their eldest child, Helen (named, one assumes, after her grandmother), was born on 2 May 1859. That’s just one week after the wedding.

That, friends, was a shotgun wedding. My dodgy ancestor had knocked up the boss’s daughter – or the neighbour’s daughter, possibly; I’ve seen no direct evidence that he worked for the McGeachys, and the most likely source of that evidence, the 1851 census, for some reason doesn’t have the McGeachys in it at all. They’re there in 1841 and 1861, just not 1851. Perhaps the data hasn’t been transcribed, or there’s been an error.

What’s more, this was a shotgun wedding at very close to the last minute, suggesting that there was considerable resistance to it happening at all.

The following year, 1860, Barbara McMillan and an “infant” are on the passenger list of an immigrant ship, the (ironically named, in the circumstances) Northern Bride, sailing from Liverpool (departing 14 June) to Auckland (arriving 11 October). Colin McMillan is not on that list. Either he was omitted in error, or he joined her soon afterwards, because their next child, Robert, was born in August 1861. My great-grandfather, Neil Archibald McMillan, followed in 1863, and lived to be 100. They had 12 children in all.

From these bare and official facts, we can infer youthful foolishness, seduction across class lines, scandal, family arguments, and the couple, not feeling welcome in the town where they had grown up, deciding (or being encouraged by her family to decide) to emigrate to a place where nobody knew them and make a fresh start.

I’ve been spending a bit of time lately looking into my family history, and have come across an interesting story. As a writer, piecing the story together from sparse official records has been an enjoyable challenge.

Originally, I was trying to find more information about my mysterious great-great-grandfather, John Channon. According to family legend (which may well be inaccurate; this is my memory of what my father, who died nearly 30 years ago, told me, which he in turn must have heard from his mother in his childhood), when Old Man Channon was on his deathbed, he told his children, “You think my name’s Channon, don’t you? Well, that’s all you know.” A separate but connected family story claims that he ran away to sea at the age of 9 and changed his name so he couldn’t be traced.

We know, or think we know, his date and place of birth: 25 September 1829, Torquay, Torbay, Devon, England. Unfortunately, there isn’t a free online source of parish records for Torquay in 1829, so I can’t just check all male infants born on that day and see if there was a John Channon or someone else who could be him. Interestingly, while trying to research him, I did come across a John Channon born in Torquay in 1830, though I can’t find him again. The birth date could be wrong (and the name-change story apocryphal, or just the old man messing with his kids), or he could have taken the name of someone he knew, in an early example of identity theft.

As at the first English census, 1841, when he was 12, there are three John Channons recorded as having been born in Devon in 1829. One is in Farway, 43 miles from Torquay, living with multiple people also surnamed Channon. One is in Lympstone, 41 miles from Torquay, and he is living with a couple named Llewellin, presumably as a servant or labourer of some kind on their farm, Pitt Farm. The third is at Cheriton Fitzpaine, 34 miles inland (the other two are near the coast), and appears to be living in a lodging house of some kind, or possibly a large household in which multiple people working in a business are also housed; they have a range of ages, and different surnames from each other and from the head of the household, whose name is Melhuish, and several of them (not John) are described as “apprentice”. Any of these theoretically could be him; the “ran away to sea at nine years old” story could be apocryphal and he could have been living with his family, or with either of the other families. Or perhaps he actually was at sea at the time.

The next we know of him for certain is from his obituary, which states that he came to New Zealand as third mate on the ship William Miles in 1862.

Now, in 1862 the William Miles carried over 300 colonists intended for the last settlement in New Zealand, Albertland (later known as Port Albert), and I happen to know from my father that my ancestors settled there. So I went in search of the ship’s passenger list.

John Channon isn’t on it – not too surprisingly, since he was crew, not a passenger. But, I wondered, what about my great-grandmother, Jane Masefield, who married John? Sure enough.

So it seems they almost certainly met on the ship, and he left the ship in order to marry her – which he did about six months after landing.

The ship landed on 12 November 1862, after a voyage of more than three months, starting on 25 July (or 29 July) from Gravesend in Kent, near the mouth of the Thames. A diary of one of the other passengers has been preserved, typed up, scanned, and put online, and is well worth the read, not only for the vividly-described vicissitudes of the voyage (a cabin 10 feet by 5 for a family of four; not touching land even to resupply, or even being in sight of land most of the time; battered by storms; several deaths on board, including, sadly, three children of the chaplain, but also three births) but for the writer’s humourous observations and erratic spelling.

There is also, apparently, a journal of another passenger, Joseph Rogers, held in the collection of the Auckland City Library, which I plan to take a look at some time. And there’s a piece in the Daily Southern Cross for the day after the arrival, giving the correspondence between the crew and the captain about what an awful condition the ship was in, or, according to the captain, wasn’t in.

So, who was Jane Masefield? She was born 18 November 1826, almost three years before John, in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands. Her baptismal record describes her father as a “labourer,” though he’s later described on the census as a “market gardener”. She probably would have received, at best, a basic primary education.

She appears on the first three English censuses, 1841, 1851 and 1861. (Unfortunately, unlike Britain, New Zealand did not retain the original census documents from the early censuses, so we don’t have census records of her here.) In 1841 she’s a 14-year-old girl living with her parents and seven siblings, aged 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. Ten years later, she is still living at home, along with three siblings, aged 7 (John), 12 (Angela, the second youngest as at the previous census) and 15 (William); let’s note that the youngest was born since the previous census, meaning nine children in all, and there could be others who were born and died in between censuses for all we know. Maria, the youngest child in 1841, is missing, probably deceased.

By 1861, the year before Jane emigrated, she is keeping house for William, now 25, a grocer (in later censuses, a preserve manufacturer), and their youngest brother John, now 17, his assistant, in Birmingham. Her age is given as 33, which is a slight understatement; whose, we have no way to tell.

So why would she take the drastic step of emigrating to New Zealand? The answer, or as much of it as I’ll probably ever learn, is back in the passenger list for the William Miles. Her five-years-younger brother Joseph, born 1831 (he’s the 9-year-old in the 1841 census), along with his wife Mary or May (formerly McGeach or McGooch – spelling seems to have been a bit optional) and their daughter Grace, the survivor of a pair of twins born in 1859, are on that list too. So she didn’t come out here alone, as I at first thought she might have, but accompanied her married brother and his family. Probably in another of those 5×10 cabins, if not worse.

This piece in the Daily Southern Cross gives a summary of the voyage and a passenger list, which lists Joseph as a “farmer”. It does not give an occupation for the women, and lists Jane alongside Grace and May without further commentary; sister, wife, daughter, it’s all the same.

And on the ship, she meets the third mate. Remember, by the time they land she’s a single woman a week short of her 37th birthday, which in 1862 was definite old-maid territory. She probably had planned to live with her brother and his wife and be maiden aunt to their children, who eventually numbered ten, counting the already-deceased twin. But somehow or other, she ended up marrying the sailor, and they had two children, the younger being my great-grandfather, William Masefield Channon.

Now, when I was born, my mother was a few months short of 40, and my grandmother – Jane and John’s granddaughter – apparently expressed the concern that I would be mentally challenged because of being born to an older mother. She was either unaware of, or, knowing my grandmother, deliberately chose to ignore her own family history; Jane’s first child was born when she was about 38, and her second, my grandmother’s father, the year she turned 40. (His birth date was given as “1875” on the family tree on FamilySearch, but that’s obviously unlikely, given that his mother would have been close to 50; his obituary at his death in 1959 says he was born in 1866, and I’ve amended the record accordingly.)

William Masefield Channon married Alice Mabel Wadham Llewellyn Wangford, who operated a boarding house in the town of Helensville in the early years of the 20th century. That’s how her daughter Hazel Jane met my grandfather, William Colin Archibald McMillan (known as “Arch”); he was an engine driver for the railways, which ended at Helensville in those days, and used to stay in the boarding house overnight before driving the train back to Auckland. But all of that is material for further posts.