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Professional genealogist Emma Jolly has helped trace the family trees of both Discworld author Terry Pratchett and Gospel Oak resident Michael Palin |
‘Tracing the past takes detective work’
Libraries help researchers learn about their family trees, providing a record of social history
YOU can spot a genealogist when the first question they ask after you give your name is: “Are you northern?”
Well, no but with a name like Teasdale, I suppose my ancestors must have been.
For Emma Jolly, there is no such ambiguity.
Living up to her fitting nomenclature, she is certainly passionate about family trees and encouraging local people to find out about their own family histories.
“In Camden we are so lucky to have the amount of resources that are available here,” she says. “People come from all over the world to go to the British Library as well as to the Principal Probate Registry [which holds records of all wills made in England and Wales since 1858].”
Interested in history as a child, Emma has been a professional genealogist for three years and has traced the family trees of both Discworld author Terry Pratchett and Gospel Oak resident Michael Palin.
“He chose me to do his as I live in Camden, kind of near him,” she says.
But it’s not just famous names who have interesting pasts. As she works freelance as a researcher, anyone and everyone can use her expertise to trace their relatives: “I meet all kinds of people. TV people who want research for a programme as well as people tracing relatives.
“I’ve had somebody who was adopted and she wanted to find out who she was and what her parents had done.”
It’s not just people interested in previous generations of their family who come to Emma for help. Some even employ her to trace people with no relation to them at all.
She says: “There was an old bloke who found this car in a swamp and he employed me to trace the owner as he wanted to find out how it had got there.
“It is detective work, it definitely is, that’s why I like it.”
But isn’t researching your family tree a hobby for the more mature citizens?
“It’s kind of too late by then in a way,” she said.
“A lot of older people that I come across say ‘I wish I’d done this as a child’ because one of the most important ways of getting this kind of information is by talking to the older generations.”
She added: “It’s not just about drawing a tree and finding names, it’s about putting flesh on bones and finding details of who people really were.
“I’m interested in social history,” she tells me. In fact, it’s amazing just what a genealogist can uncover: “There are a lot of people who are trying to find missing fathers – I can’t tell you the names of them as I’ll get into trouble – but they are often to do with cases of illegitimacy where the father has a wife but also a mistress with four or five children.”
In another case, she dealt with a woman trying to arrange a tour of the Belgian battlefields to visit the grave of her father only to find that the man named on her birth certificate had been killed before she had been conceived.
“It’s hard to break news like that as I try to have a good relationship with the families that I work with,” she said. “It’s very personal information so it is really important that it’s handled sensitively.
“All Camden residents, through their local library, can use a website called ancestry.com that has loads and loads of records – even from the USA and Canada – and with a library card you can access them for free,” she says.
And how would they start?
With their name of course. |
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