The first family I researched was my surname, the Pickles. I got back to someone born around 1795 and was struggling to get further. So when I started on the Bedfords, I expected to stop somewhere similar. But that did not happen. My earliest person was born about 1620, almost two hundred years further back. That meant I had a lot more to write about, crossing many different periods and socioeconomic changes.
What the records revealed
Some of what I found challenged what you would expect. In the 1750s and 60s, the Bedfords were being educated. The cottage weaving industry was doing well. But when the mills came and cloth prices dropped, the later generations could no longer afford school fees. So you get educated people in the mid-1700s, and then their descendants become uneducated.
I also found that people in the early to mid-1800s lived shorter lives than those in the 1700s. It was the urbanisation, the move to the cities, the crowded living conditions, the disease. When you think of history, you usually think as you go further back, things get worse. But it was not like that at all.
Connecting through DNA
One of the most rewarding parts has been connecting with distant relatives through DNA matches. People put their DNA on Ancestry and attach it to their family tree. I could search for anyone with an ancestor called Joseph Bedford and find people who share common ancestors with me.
I sent a book to a relative in the USA descended from my four times great-grandparents. One of their children had left Liverpool for Boston in the 1850s. Our families had gone down completely different paths since. I sent another to Canada, another to Newcastle. I just put it out there and said, I have written this book about our common ancestor, would you be interested in a copy?
Writing with care
I was very careful about how I wrote the book. At the end of the day, it is my ancestors I am talking about, and they have not given me consent. So I try to be fair to them. I do not assume the worst. Sometimes people have done the wrong thing and it is blatantly obvious, and that is in the book. But I have been very careful and very conservative.
The Gidlow project
The Bedford book was, in a way, a bit of a practice run for writing a book on the Gidlows. They were wealthy, landed gentry from Lancashire. I have spent a lot of time at archives in London and Preston, finding records for them. A lot of it is in Latin, medieval legal speak. I have had to have things translated and unpick it all.
Someone wrote a book about the Gidlows back in about 1972, but it has been out of print for a long time. People keep asking where they can find it. I now know far more than he did, and it is easier to research these days. There are quite a lot of people in the US descended from the Gidlows, and people in the local area who would be interested too. So I want to create something more comprehensive than has ever been written about them.