Your favourite ancestor

[anne fraser]

I liked Samuel Blacker at first because of his unusual name. He is one of my father's ancestors. The family story that I have been unable to prove or disprove is that his family came from Carrick Blacker in Ireland. They were on the losing side in the battle of the Boyne and three brothers found it desirable to settle in Somerset.

I first come across Samuel owning the manor of Midsummer Norton and a tenant of the Duchy of Cornwall. He started a coalmine on his land. I can't find details of his first wife but late in life he married for the second time to Elizabeth Brookman and the couple had four children. My ancestor another Samuel and three daughters Elizabeth, Mary and Sarah. Elizabeth became an 1820 settler to South Africa and the family were prominent in early South African history. She was buried beside the Great Fsh river.

Other family stories are that Mary was buried in a leadlined coffin in London and that one of Sarah's children was killed by a sibling in a shooting accident. I have been unable to find evidence for either story.

[Phoenix]

May I nominate, on behalf of best mate, Great Granny Lanning?

The only thing we can say with any certainty is that she was not a Lanning.

We have at least three candidates:

Jane Clements b Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire c 1780 m George Lanning and then James McLeod
Rebecca Horseman nee Taylor b Castle Camps, Cambridgeshire c 1800 second wife of Jane's son George Lanning (and probably his deceased wife's sister)
Sarah Coombes second wife of Jane's son Thomas Lanning

Tree and notes are at home, but the journey has been fscinating, teasing out the facts from the stories we heard as children. BM's granddaughters are also being regaled with stories. I particularly like the highwayman:

GGL was travelling in a coach when she was held up by a highwayman. She gathered her jewels, wrapped them in a shawl and said "Pray, do not wake my baby"

Although she lived to tell the tale, we have never found evidence of the jewels!!

[Nell]

Well, I know who'd be on my list of most exasperating ancestor!!!

Favourites, well I suppose the ones I've found out most about, because that helps bring them to life.

I am quite fond of my gt x 3 grandfather Robert Chowns. His settlement dispute enabled me to find out some details of his life, how much he paid in rent, the fact the ceiling of his house fell in, etc. He also lived for over 20 years in an almshouse. I looked in vain for his death for ages, in the days when you had to trawl through the ledgers at the now defunct Family Records Centre. When I got his death cert from the GRO I was thrilled - he'd died of old age at the age of 93. I was dancing round the room with excitement when my son said "But he was born in 1779, of course he's dead"!

[Val in Oz]

It has to be OH's goodness knows how many greats uncle Joseph Samain who was born in 1773 in London, son of Abraham and Ann. He joined the Navy and fought on Admiral Duncan's flagship the Venerable in the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 as an ordinary seaman, but the lovely fellow wrote a letter to his family whilst waiting on board ship at the Nore in the Thames Estuary for repairs.
This letter is now held in the Naval Museum in London, and in it he gave a detailed account of the Battle, plus he wrote out a list of all the Dutch ships and their captains.

This alone drew me to him as none of the Samain family - right up to the present day - are known for their letter writing skills......lol

He eventually settled in America where he married and started the Samain dynasty over there and there was much information to be found about him.
I have really enjoyed researching Joseph.

[Lindsay]

My favourites are definitely the ones I've found most information on - so almost any of mine who left Wills (not many of them did), went to court or appeared in the newspapers are on the list.

An unusual name helps - Zachariah Senier ticked all the above boxes and was a dream to research. And there's the (so far unanswered) question of why a man who spent 30 years as a London draper decided to move back to Yorkshire and become an iron founder two years before he died - perhaps that's the form a mid-life crisis took in the nineteenth century?

Conversely, I found it very hard to get excited about OH's Sadds - generation after generation of ag labs called John and Mary Sadd, who married people called John and Mary and had children called, you've guessed, John and Mary.

[Jill]

I am very fond of my Badcocks who sometimes had distant relations to stay on census nights, and would often like to marry one as well. Berkshire was riddled with them and some emigrated to Australia. The names Joses and Thirza often crop up with makes them easier to find, though three disliked their surname and changed it.

My OH's wider Juniper family owned the Rose and Crown at Cuckfield and his Holfords were tenants at The Crown at Horsted Keynes both of which do superb food so as well as visiting the villages for research and visiting the family graves we feel duty bound to pop in for lunch!