Going places

Detail of the exterior of the church of St Mary Magdalen in Launceston, Cornwall. This is the town where the police headquarters are, where my young detective, Megan Pencarrow, works. She's the niece of the main protagonist of my Cornish mystery series.

Having at long last succeeded in signing in to the blog, I'm still figuring out how to format, so excuse the confusion please! These pics were supposed to come at the end of my post...

A shop in Port Isaac. Eleanor Trewynn, the main character of my Cornish mysteries, has a charity shop on the ground floor of her cottage, though I haven't given her bow windows.

The tor on top of Rough Tor, second highest spot on Bodmin Moor, with the highest, Brown Willy, in the background. These landmarks make frequent appearances in the books.

Last Saturday, I was invited to give a talk to the Pacific Northwest Cornish Society. To be frank, I'd never heard of them. They're a group of people who have traced their ancestry to Cornwall, and they get together three times a year to talk genealogy and celebrate their heritage. Their president had read my Cornish mysteries, Manna from Hades and A Colourful Death, and decided the members would be interested in hearing about my Cornish roots.

Alas, as far as ancestry is concerned, I have none. My familiarity with and love of Cornwall come from annual summer holidays on the North Coast in my childhood, and visits to my sister on the other side of the duchy in the decades since she went to live there.

So, unable to interest them in my family tree, I resorted to showing pictures from both my childhood and my research. I'd like to share some of them with you, too.

Port Isaac

Boscastle

Port Isaac harbour

Boscastle Harbour

Boscastle and Port Isaac are the two small fishing ports I combined to create my fictional village, Port Mabyn.

Well, that's that for now, so now we'll see if it actually posts when I tell it!

Cheers,

Carola Dunn

Searching for My Grandparents

by Jean Henry Mead

My grandfather was a man of mystery who died when I was nine months old. He was mysterious because he told few people about his roots. My mother thought he had been born in Macon County, Georgia, but when my husband and I make the cross country trip, we found that the courthouse had succumbed to fire in 1922. So much for birth records. We even searched the cemetery one foggy morning in June, but there wasn't one headstone that contained the name of Henry.

I knew his date of birth, where he was buried, my grandmother’s name and the names of their children, but that’s all I knew when I began a genealogy search. I found a post card among my mother’s possesssions when she died. A friend had written while visiting Virginia, saying how proud my mother must be to have descended from Patrick Henry.

That’s strange, I thought. Why hadn't Mom ever mentioned that Patrick Henry was an ancestor? I paid for membership in Genealogy.com and tried reading online copies of old census reports. After scrolling through hundreds of pages of nearly illegal records, I found my grandfather and his young family listed, but in the origin’s box he was a native of the USA. And no state was listed in subsequent census records.

Why would Grandad not list his birth state? My mother said that he was estranged from his family and also wondered why. He refused to talk about it, she said. That spurred me on to learn about his family and the rest of my ancestors. After months of leaving messages on genealogy websites, I was still in the proverbial dark. Then, one day I happened upon a census report with his middle name changed, but my grandmother’s name was correct as well as those of their children. Was he running from the law or just didn’t want to be found?

I must have been searching for five years when I came across a family in Ebert, Georgia, that seemed to solve the mystery. My grandfather was listed as the seventh child of a country doctor with six older sisters. Some of the sister’s names were the same as his own daughters. Because Grandad was the youngest, was he spoiled by all those sisters? And did he have a falling out with his father because he didn’t want to repeat his medical career?

Thanks a lot, Grandad, I thought, as I dug still deeper into additional old records. I was finally able to trace back several generations to the mid-1700s but there was no Patrick Henry listed in our family tree. Born in 1736, Patrick, who had 16 or 17 children, only had grandchildren by six of them, so that narrowed down the search considerably.

Disappointed, I decided to search for my mysterious paternal grandmother, who died at the age of 40 before I was born. A cousin on the East Coast sent me a photograph of my grandmother and I seemed to have been cloned. She had passed on her height to me as well as her appearance, so if you believe in reincarnation, it does make one wonder.

I’m still searching Grandmother Daisy's background, but haven’t yet located my great-grandparents. I'll keep trying so that I can pass the information on to my children and grandchildren along with copies of any old photos I've inherited. I think it's important to look to the future but it's also satisfying to know from where you've come.