The History Group

Leader:  Ronald (Yogi) Godwin - history@ashbyu3a.co.uk - phone 01530 467840

Yogi is ably assisted by Jane Barnett, Barbara Ball, Colin Ellis, Jane Harris and Isobel Salt

Contrary to what you may have heard, the Group is NOT closing but is continuing for at least next year.

All Ashby u3a members are welcome at our meetings.

All meetings with speakers will be held at Packington Memorial Hall on the 4th Thursday of the month.
Doors open for Packington meetings at 2.15pm. Admission £2

Details of visits will be advised closer to the time.
The following dates have been arranged, but may be subject to changes which will be announced as and when they are known.

Monday 22nd April. ‘A Family Affair’ by Adrian Hickson

One of our own, Adrian Hickson, gave a first-class presentation of his family history to 31 members.

In a model of how to do and present his research, Adrian first introduced us to his immediate family parents and grandparents. With photos (including a charming one of five-year-old Adrian!) and a short introduction, he led us into the story.

A first he believed the family had originated in Birmingham, but his researches quickly led him to Wisbech. A map of England showed a predominance of his name across the Midlands from coast to coast, yet the majority of his ancestors hailed from the East Coast. A fascinating story emerged from documents and pictures (photographs and drawings) of his great-great grandfather’s family of ship owners and merchant mariners operating out of Wisbech. Owning three ships in the middle of the 19th Century, including the schooners Minerva and Economy and the paddle steamer Don, they were very active along the East coast and across to Northwest Europe. Adrian showed us the certificates of his great-great grandfather’s registration as a mariner, and the ships he owned. They also owned the Rose Tap inn. There were many other documents that Adrian had uncovered in the Fenland Museum, including the logbooks of the ships and a legal battle over the salvage of the Minerva after she was wrecked.

But Adrian’s research did not stop at Wisbech. He traced the earlier family back to a place called Barkstone le Vale, some 60 miles west of Wisbech and 15 miles east of Nottingham, where in 2012 he found a huge display of the family trees of all the families in the village on display in the church.

Cutting a long story short, Adrian has managed to trace his paternal family line back to 1776 using the conventional sources of censuses, electoral registers, directories and Parish Records (among others) and then further back to 1550 using Parish Records only.

The treats did not stop there.

Adrian then outlined the curious case of Maria, his great-great grandmother, wife of Thomas. She was a Hitchborn, not an uncommon name in the area. He was puzzled by the discrepancy in the presumed date of her birth, which varied from census to census, from 1806 to 1808. This is not an unusual situation. However, he found a Parish Register entry of a baptism in early 1805, suggesting a birth possibly in late 1804. Were there two Maria Hitchborns?

This small discrepancy led him on an adventure few of us Family Historians have had. Unravelling the ancestry of Maria revealed multiple cases down the years of her siblings, and their descendants, marrying descendants of Thomas Hickson’s ancestors.

The resultant Tree resembled a plumber’s nightmare. Fortunately, Adrian’s engineering background and first-class coloured annotation of the slides helped us understand the complex interweaving of the two families. His software package enabled him to show us reports and listings, one of which showed the relationships revealed by the analysis of the Tree. This latter showed that many of the people listed had multiple cousin links to each other and himself. A bewildering concatenation of cross-links!

We were left gasping at the prospect of such a tree, and mightily impressed by his highly professional and skilled analysis and presentation of a very difficult project.

Earlier history meeting