It was Monday morning and a sleek silver Mercedes pulled up outside the house.
The driver took my suitcase and I kissed goodbye to my family, the current
Rudds.
I would be spending the next two days in the company of past Rudds. Ex-Rudds.
Ancient Rudds who I didn’t even know existed. I would be going on a trip
into my own family history.
My guide, Sue Hills, had spent the previous few weeks researching my family
tree. She had enlisted the help of some of the country’s top genealogists
and local historians. She had driven from obscure parish to obscure parish,
checking clues and sifting through ancient dusty books. She had examined the
crumbling tombstones in three overgrown graveyards and combed through an
entire century of Rudd-related microfiche.
That morning, though, I had no idea where her research had taken her. All I
knew, as the car stopped to pick up my dad, was that Hills was waiting for
us in Canterbury. This was a mystery family history tour.
If any of this sounds familiar, it is because Hills is a director on Who Do
You Think You Are?, the hit BBC television series where celebrities take a
trip back into their past. Returning for a new series next month, this is
the programme which revealed that Barbara Windsor, the star of Carry On
films and EastEnders, was related to John Constable, the artist, that the
actor John Hurt’s theory that he came from posh stock was wrong and that
Jeremy Paxman, the fearsome interrogator on the BBC’s Newsnight, was capable
of crying when he found out that his great-grandmother had been refused poor
relief because she had had an illegitimate child.
Now Hills has set up Ancestral Footsteps, a company which offers the same (but
camera crew-free) experience to noncelebrities. For £25,000 she will create
a seven-day bespoke tour of your heritage, complete with the car, country
house hotels and fine food. And, of course, the several months of
painstaking research which precedes it.
One of the things that she cannot guarantee is that your ancestors will be
good, upstanding citizens. Indeed, she even asks you to sign a piece of
paper promising not to get too upset if it turns out that your
great-great-grandmother was a hooker.
“It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re researching your family tree and head
up the wrong branch,” explained Hills. “We triple-check everything, so you
know it’s right. It just might be different from what you were expecting.”
It sounded as if she was preparing me for bad news.
The extent of interest with genealogy first became clear in 2002 when the data
from the 1901 census was posted online. The website was overwhelmed,
crashing under the weight of 30m hits a day as people looked up their
ancestors.
In the past few years, however, that interest has become something like an
obsession. The National Archives saw its visitor figures online and also to
its offices in Kew, west London, double from 23.2m in 2006 to 56.8m in 2007.
It attributed much of the new interest to series such as Who Do You Think
You Are?
Websites that help you to track your ancestors, it is claimed, are now more
popular than online pornography. Genesreunited, a spin-off from the
Friendsreunited website that puts school friends back in touch with one
another, for example, averages 50m hits a month. It says it has 8m
registered users in Britain alone.
If you are brave enough, Ancestry.co.uk offers a DNA test to its 200,000
British subscribers. It then matches the results and lets you know which
other subscribers are most likely to be your relatives.
The website’s parent company, the Generations Network which is based in Utah
(Mormons are big into family history), was bought recently in a £370m deal.
Other DNA-based sites can put you in touch with people around the world who
share a distant ancestor with you. There is big money in amateur
ancestor-hunting.
Hills takes it a step further, bringing a professional’s discipline to the
search. It is expensive, but its results can of course be extrapolated to
many family members. For the full £25,000 Hills will research your whole
heritage, but for my sample she had done a quarter of my tree, the
progenitor line, and we were on a two-day mini-trip.
We started in the suitably medieval offices of Chris Schofield, a crack
Canterbury-based genealogist, and in two hours we raced back through 180
years of Rudd family history. No hookers, but an awful lot of piano
restoring.
As far back as 1837 it is relatively easy to trace your roots because of the
Registrar General of births, deaths and marriages. You can also get
professions and addresses from the census, the first of which took place in
1841. Anything earlier than that and you are looking at parish records,
which are less straightforward.
There are 15,000 parishes in England and the Victorians were an irritatingly
mobile bunch. You can lose trace of them from one scrawled page of records
to the next.
Still, Schofield and Hills had got back to Stanley Edwin Rudd, my early
Victorian ancestor. On the night of that first 1841 census, he had given his
age as 24 and his occupation as a chemist and druggist. In the “Whether born
in this county” section, he had stated “Yes” which, Schofield explained, was
a lie.
Stanley had good reason to fib. Only a few decades earlier, the poor laws had
dictated that anyone destitute would be packed off back to their home
parish. Families would often be broken apart. Only the most secure would
risk being honest about their origins.
Stanley was not secure. He had not been born in Marylebone, central London; he
had been born in Sheerness, Kent, but he admitted that only in the next
census, 10 years later.
At this point the trail had run cold. All the time team had to go on was a
tall story from Rudd folklore – that a certain Captain Martin William Rudd
had fought alongside Nelson at Trafalgar. It is the sort of tale that has
almost certainly been fabricated, either by a boastful Victorian Rudd or a
forgetful postVictorian one.
Schofield revealed that he had spent whole days searching naval records to
find my alleged heroic ancestor but to no avail. It is the kind of thing
that I would never have done on my own, allowing the family myth to go
unchecked.
He had found a John Rudd in Sheerness, a prison hulk guard who was the right
sort of age to be Stanley’s father but, as Chris put it, John was a Rudd
herring. Genealogists, it seems, love bad puns almost as much as they love
spending days searching through old navy records.
It was only days later, deep in the army records, that he found Captain Martin
William Rudd, my great-great-great-great-grandfather and fort major of
Sheerness. He had served right on the front line during the Napoleonic wars.
Out came the relevant documents – his record of pay, his gritty promotion
through the ranks and then his will. For the first time I got a tingle down
my spine.
Then Hills spoilt it all: “So this afternoon we’re going to the Isle of
Sheppey.” Because that’s another thing she cannot guarantee: that your
deluxe tour of your family history will take you anywhere, well, nice. Just
hope you find out that your roots are in the Seychelles.
Two hours later I was standing on the port wall off the Kent coast where my
ancestor had once stood, probably looking through a telescope for signs of
troublesome Frenchmen. The sun was shining, the locals seemed friendly and
even though I would never have volunteered to spend an afternoon here in
normal circumstances, it felt special.
Sitting in the old pub that Captain Rudd might have once sat in 200 years
before, Dad and I toasted our military ancestor. On reflection, we were both
in a bit of a daze. When you make such direct and unexpected connections
with your past, you feel two conflicting things: complete insignificance
(you are but the long line of generations to be hatched, matched and
promptly dispatched) and complete sense of place and purpose.
Without Captain Rudd we wouldn’t be having a pint in Sheerness. We wouldn’t be
having a pint at all. Anywhere. This is undoubtedly the context in which
Paxo blubbed.
On our whirlwind two-day tour, Hills had no time for blubbing. Instead, she
was revealing the next stage of her detective work.
In the marriage lists from Sheerness, our captain had married Maria. His home
parish was listed as Reysham, Norfolk. When Hills had discovered this some
weeks earlier, she said she had clapped her hands with excitement and
grabbed a map – only to find there was no Reysham in Norfolk. The blasted
Sheerness scribe recording the marriage had entered it incorrectly. For most
amateurs this would have been the end of the road.
Undaunted, Hills tracked down clusters of Norfolk Rudds in the 1841 census.
Aylsham, King’s Lynn or Reepham looked most likely, so she went off to the
Norfolk Records Office in Norwich, spent days on the old microfiche and
finally struck gold.
Which meant that we would now be heading to a hotel in east Norfolk for the
night, before reconvening the next day in Reepham.
I will spare you much more personal detail of the mesmerising hours looking at
more crumbling military records tracing Martin William Rudd’s rise up
through the East Norfolk Militia. Suffice to say he had been the first
literate Rudd. He had been more or less conscripted into the militia as a
25-year-old private, then marched around England suppressing unrest in the
aftermath of the French revolution. It had been his ticket out of the
Norfolk peasantry.
In Reepham we were back to the long corn-chewing phase of Rudd history. Flashy
Martin’s dad was also called Martin but he wasn’t flashy – he marked his
marriage licence with a line because he couldn’t write his own name. He
married Mary Hunt in September 1762; she gave birth a month later.
That Martin’s dad was also called Martin, although we are back to old England
by now so they spelt it Martton. His only claim to fame is that he married
another Rudd in 1741. I’m hoping that Alice Rudd and Martton Rudd were very
distant cousins when they met in the haystack. If they were not, we may have
finally worked out where the Rudd ears come from.
Before that there is no record. The Rudds must have arrived from somewhere
else.
So dad and I had another pint, had our picture taken on Rudd’s Lane, paid our
respects at Martton Rudd’s overgrown headstone, then hopped in the Merc and
went home. I haven’t felt quite the same since.
Additional reporting: Anna Leach
Some cheaper alternatives
If you haven’t got £25,000 spare to get a bespoke tour of your ancestry, here
are four good entry points where you can start DIY heritage-hunting:
bbcwhodoyouthinkyouare.com
The website accompanying the BBC ancestry programme is a good, all-purpose
starting point for family-tree research. Particularly good are the
scene-setting features for the various censuses available online. So you can
find out what sort of clothing your peasant ancestors would have dressed in
Genesreunited.co.uk
A spin-off from Friendsreunited, the website that put us all in touch with the
kids we never liked at school, this puts dead people in touch. Or rather, it
allows people to join up their family trees. Good fun but full of red
herrings. You are relying on others’ digging Ancestry.co.uk Gives access to
all the censuses from 1841 to 1901, as well as a variety of birth, marriage
and death records from 1837, phone directories, slave registers, army
service records and what have you. A paid-for service (starting from £10.95)
but with free trials
Achievements.co.uk
Traced yourself back to Jack the Ripper? Hoping you might have got it wrong?
Enough DIY – you need a professional. The team at the Institute of Heraldic
and Genealogical Studies in Canterbury offers to trace your tree. A guide
price for a specific request such as tracking your father’s line as far as
possible is £450. The institute also runs courses in the cunning techniques
of heritage-hunting
If you are feeling flush, Ancestral Footsteps is at www.ancestralfootsteps.co.uk
