My Passion With Anne Cassidy

Anne Cassidy, cashier at Begbies Traynor in Leeds, on tracing her family tree.

I BECAME interested in genealogy when my partner’s father died.

One of the possessions he left was a diary dated 1916 which started with the heart-wrenching words “Dad died today”. We didn’t know much about his grandfather, Reuben Manship who was killed in the First World War, but armed just with his name and the date of his death, I set about finding out more.

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Starting with the Commonwealth War Graves list on the internet, I discovered his regiment and rank and found he had died at the battle of the Somme. Having such an unusual surname made the task slightly easier and I came across other researchers through the family history societies who were also looking for members of the Manship family.

We regularly email each other and exchange information. I also subscribe to the Ancestry website which is great for records of births, deaths and marriages.

Having spent an average of four hours a week for the last 10 years undertaking painstaking online research as well as making regular visits to the records office in Leicester and various cemeteries, including the war graves in France, I have managed to trace the family back eight generations to 1740. Based around Leicester, they worked in the hosiery industry. I’m now searching for Richard Manship, a carpenter born in the 1700s. There are probably five other Manship family researchers who are also looking for him, but so far, none of us have been able to track him down.

I’ve also traced my own family back to 1850, although with a southern Irish name, it’s been difficult without being in Ireland. On my mother’s side, I tracked the family name Yorke back to 1500 when the first documented Yorke was knighted by King Henry VII.

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While programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? have made the hobby much more popular, they are also misleading. It’s likely to have taken a team of researchers months and months to trace the family tree of the celebrities on the show – it really is a tortuous and time-consuming task.

Many people don’t realise that until 1837, births, marriages and deaths did not legally have to be registered so will only be recorded in a parish register if a ceremony was held – this makes it particularly difficult to trace poorer families. They’re also less likely to have headstones, so often it’s a matter of searching plot numbers and guessing where the grave is.

I’ve been fascinated by the detective work I’ve carried out and it’s given me tremendous satisfaction to be able to trace back more than 300 years. I intend to carry on going back as far as I can, but if anyone comes across a Leicester carpenter born between 1700 and 1740 with a name like Manship, please let me know.

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