Understanding your family history can be a wonderful journey and a cathartic experience, giving you a sense of place and purpose. I would be delighted to help and can provide you with family tree charts and background reports of the highest standard, in a format of your choice.
I have been studying genealogy since 2014 alongside a career in the international wine trade. Always wanting to expand my knowledge on the subject, I am studying with the IHGS (Institute for Heraldic and Genealogical Studies) and attend courses run by AGRA (Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives) with whom I am an Associate. I am also a member of the Society of Genealogists and numerous UK county family history societies.
Since 2017, I have worked on over 35 cases for people in the UK including some that have taken me to research records in Switzerland, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Canada and the USA.
My love of genealogy was started by a visit to my mother, looking for some correspondence regarding her brother who died in 1960. I came across a six-page document written by my father in the 1980s which he had prepared for my sister and me. It was a potted history of his family who came from Ireland and Lancashire with various amusing anecdotes.
The final page included the many dead ends he had come across and I resolved at that moment to chase down as many as I could and complete his work, something that has taken me several years on and off and required the help of two other genealogists! It is now complete, and every dead end solved. Learning about his family, about whom I knew little, filled a void in my life and it is a privilege to be able to help others on similar journeys.
A Lidgett (formerly Lyd-gate) is an animal or livestock gateway and was usually an area on the edge of settlements and pastureland.
Sitting on the eastern edge of the former mill town of Colne in Lancashire is the Lidgett – a row of cottages built for handloom weavers in the late 1700s & early 1800s. The surrounding pasture would have provided the wool that was then spun in the upper floors of the cottages, before being replaced by cotton as the main industry.
The land on which the cottages sit was owned by my 6x great-grandfather, Thomas Smith of Standroyd. Through marriage and inheritance by eldest sons the land and the title of the cottages fell to Thomas Whitaker (1790-1848), a local drapery hawker and publican.
Before Thomas married, he had a relationship with Peggy Hartley (1797-1858) and had two illegitimate children, Joseph and Mary, likely born at Lidgett Hall. Joseph took his mother’s surname of Hartley. Joseph was my great-great-grandfather and lived at 22 Lidgett in 1841.
My father was born 105 years after Joseph in 1923, just a couple of miles up the road in Brierfield.
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I specialise in UK family history research and helping you get behind the brick walls that we so often face in research.
I can also undertake:
SEARCH FOR WILLS AND PROBATE RECORDS >>
PROVISION OF DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE >>
LOCATION OF MISSING AND UNKNOWN RELATIVES >>
TRANSCRIPTION OF OLD DOCUMENTS >>
You may be an entirely competent researcher in your own right but perhaps need a second opinion or fresh set of eyes on a piece of your own work. This is also something I can do for you.