About Me

My name is Steffi. I'm an amateur family historian living in the UK. I was born in the early 1980s.

Family historian or genealogist?

I prefer the terms family history and family historian over genealogy and genealogist. Although these are often used synonymously, in its strictest sense genealogy refers only to the tracing of a particular person's lineage or pedigree. Historically, a genealogy (singular), would be a means of proving who the heir was to a particular royal or aristocratic title, or of seeking to legitimise a particular dynasty by linking them to an often mythical founder figure. Today, the name seems to imply an association with genes and genetics. In my research, I've never been especially interested in simply producing a long list of names and dates, finding the origins of my surname or seeing how far back I can go. Also, while I do use DNA testing as a research tool which helps confirm or deny certain links, I am not particularly bothered about my "bloodline" or my genetic composition. I am much more interested in how my ancestors lived their lives, what they thought and felt, and how the actions of each generation have shaped the fate of the ones that came after.

Unfortunately, the term "family history" has certain connotations today, thanks to the LDS church calling its record repository the Family History Library. While they have for many decades made a vast collection of historical material freely available to the public, I have some... ethical concerns with the church's use of records for proxy baptism of the dead, as well as their insistence on making most of their records only accessible through in-person visits to LDS branches, despite those records now being digitized and hosted online. Ironically, the church's use of records to acquire names of deceased ancestors for posthumous baptism is in my view far closer to the strict definition of genealogy.

Mormon appropriation of the term aside, I feel that family history is the best description for this project.

Why do this?

I think, if I'm honest, the most simple reason is that I just find it interesting and satisfying to research and write about my ancestors. When learning about historical events, they often seem like something very distant that we are completely cut off from today, but I find it fascinating to think that we are directly linked to the past through an unbroken chain from our parents (or whoever raised us), to their parents, and so on. It is said that everyone on earth is connected through a maximum of seven degrees of separation. However, if you consider the oldest person you knew as a child, then the oldest person they knew as a child, and so forth, you start to realise that we are only a few degrees of separation away from people who lived centuries ago.

Through these ancestral links we receive far more than physical traits and hereditary illnesses, as each generation passes on its successes and its failures, its privileges and its prejudices, its wisdom and its trauma. And for all that they lived in an unimaginably different time, they were as human as we are, and they lived as we might have done had we been born then. This is my attempt to record those human lives, with the same care and attention historians would give to better-known individuals. I hope that this project will be of interest to anyone who also has a family connection to the people I am writing about, and perhaps to others who enjoy reading about social history.

The state of family history research

The rise of websites such as Ancestry, MyHeritage and FindMyPast has revolutionised the way in which family historians work. It has brought many positives such as the mass digitization of historical records and the ability to simply type an ancestor's name into a search bar and comb through results, but the way these companies operate has many downsides. Sites such as Ancestry bombard users with AI-generated "hints" which may or may not truly relate to one's ancestors. They also allow you to quickly duplicate an ancestor's information from another user's tree to your own, meaning errors get copied over and over. The goal is to astonish the beginner with quick and easy results during a free trial, encouraging them to pay for a subscription, with the side effect of disincentivizing careful research. These profit-driven services also show little quality control in their transcription of records, and on numerous occasions I have struggled to find someone who was clearly listed on a document simply because their name was mistranscribed by the company's legion of underpaid non-experts.

For this reason it was important to me to create family history content that fully cites its sources, as well as making the results of all my research freely available.

Website name

Personage is a silly word but one that I like the sound of. It is defined by wiktionary as "A person, especially one who is famous or important". If you are not familiar with it, the phrase "no less a personage" crops up usually in older literature as a sort of pompous alternative to "none other", for example: "It was no less a personage than his majesty the king". The website name is supposed to be a pun on that phrase and a subersion of the way the word was used. Just because someone was not a notable historical figure, they are no less a personage.

The biographies

Who gets a biography?

I hope to eventually create biographies for all of my known ancestors from great-great-grandparents to at least as far back as 5x great-grandparents, and further back in a few cases. It's unlikely I'll be writing about anyone who lived much before 1700. Generally the further you go back the scarcer records become and the harder it is to be certain about anything, and there definitely comes a point for me where a person's life stops feeling like family history and more like just history.

I am also doing biographies in some cases for people like siblings and stepparents. These people would normally be mentioned within the regular biographies, but sometimes there is so much to say about them they get their own little spin-off, so to speak.

I am creating biographies of my great-grandparents themselves, but I have decided not to make them public on this website, instead sharing them only with close relatives. I am not intending to create biographies of my parents or grandparents. These choices are partly to protect my family's privacy, and partly because writing about events that are well within living memory isn't really the point of this project.

Names

When naming people on the tree pages or the title of their biography page, I use their full name, but within the text of a biography I use their given name, in the form they would have been known to friends and family to the best of my knowledge.

For given names, I will use the form and spelling that the person appears to have favoured themselves, if I have evidence of this. For example Alis Sansom is often referred to by the more typical spelling Alice in official documents, but on her marriage record she signs her name Alis, so I have gone with this spelling. I will make an exception to this when the only sample of a person's signature has a very strange or illogical spelling that we can safely assume is an error. If a person themselves used multiple spellings throughout their life, I will generally go for the one they used most often or latest.

In cases where someone appears to have adopted a new given name for themself, I use their later name over their birth one. A good example of this is Hope Davis, who was baptised "Florentine" (probably in error), is recorded as either "Follentine" or "Valentine" in childhood and early adulthood, but is recorded exclusively as "Hope" from the age of around eighteen onwards (including the one known example of her signature).

Usually I will use the full version of given names in the title of the biography page and save any diminuitive form they may have used for the body of the text. However there are some cases where a diminuitive form came to be used or was always used in formal documents, and can to all intents and purposes be regarded as their actual name. For example, Jenny Smith was named "Jane" on her birth certificate and childhood census records, but on every subsequent document including her marriage and death certificates and censuses when she was an adult, she is known as Jenny.

Surnames are generally the one the person had at birth, meaning that women who married are listed under their maiden name and not their husband's name. The only exception to this would be if someone appears to have made a decision to go by a different family name as an adult for reasons other than marriage. For example, Elizabeth Alice Horne has her father's surname (Parks) on her birth certificate, but when marrying gave her mother's surname, Horne.

Speculation and conjecture

As with anyone doing this kind of kind of research, I occasionally have to rely upon guesswork, such as when a chapter in a person's life is not covered by surviving documents, or when a very common name makes it difficult to be certain if a record refers to the right person. If I believe there is room for reasonable doubt on any part of a person's biography I will make this clear, and suggest alternative possibilities where relevant.

There are also some cases in which I am certain or virtually certain that something is correct, but this is not obvious from the easily available records. An example of this would be the fact the aforementioned Hope Davis being originally named Valentine but taking the name Hope after she was adopted by aunt and uncle. In such cases I aim to go to extra lengths to explain my reasoning and to cite the evidence that brought me to this conclusion. I usually do so in the footnotes though so as not to break the flow of the biography!

Of course no matter how careful my research is I can (and do) make mistakes, so if you think I am incorrect about anything please do contact me!

References

I always aim to give citations for everything stated in the biography, both regarding the person and the historical backdrop. While every completed biography should have a full set of references for things directly relating to that person, to avoid repetition any references for another person mentioned who has or will have their own biography will be on that other person's page. This means there might sometimes be a backlog of citations. For example, if on the biography for Matilda Shipton I talk about her daughter Jane moving away this would normally have a citation on Jane's biography, but if Jane's biography isn't online yet there wouldn't be a reference available. As always you can contact me if you need more information or a reference for someone whose biography is not yet complete.

There are certain sources I use so often and for so many different biographies, such as censuses or death certificates, that there is no point in me citing them in every single case. These sources are listed below, and can be considered a general bibliography for the entire site.

- England and Wales census 1841-1921; Public Record Office
- England and Wales certificates of birth, marriage and death; General Register Office
- Bevolkingsregisters; (held by regional archives)

In the case of first-hand sources I cite that are not freely available online, I will be happy to provide copies or transcripts upon request.

Using my work

Feel free to use any of the information on this website for your own research. The content is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, so you can share it for non-commercial purposes so long as you give attribution and release under the same license. I would appreciate that you contact me if you are planning on reproducing it anywhere else.