Those few words are what all the 'how to write a bestseller' authors will tell you are the ones that suck the reader in, grab their attention and set the tone and style for the remaining 50,000 or so words.

I had a great opening line for this book.

"My grandfather was born in a register office"

It seemed just about perfect for the beginning of a book about family history.  What a pity it's not true.  The line that got away.  I feel like a fisherman, "No honest, it was THIS good".

It's almost true though.  My grandfather. Len, spent his formative years living at his grandfather's house.  Edwin Rainbow was, amongst other things,  the Registrar of Births and Deaths of Coventry South West District.  They lived in a large house in Queens' Road, Coventry and the register office was on the premises.  Len's dad, Percy had apparently struggled financially with a business venture that hadn't worked out and the family – Len and his parents, Percy and Amy moved in with Edwin.

I was planning to wax lyrical about the rustle of birth certs and the smell of ink somehow permeating Len's psyche as a tiny baby born into the midst of Edwardian record keeping paraphernalia, thus explaining his interest in genealogy and sparking mine too, but alas it was not to be. 

The house in Queen's Road no longer exists.  I took a walk down there a couple of years ago, a cold crisp autumn day, breathy with excitement at seeing where the mythical Edwin actually lived.  At the start it looked hopeful, many of the buildings were the original double-fronted Edwardian villas, albeit now being used as solicitor's and estate agents's offices but as I arrived at number 30 I was horribly disappointed to see it had been knocked down and a student hostel built in its place.  Not an inappropriate choice of building though as Edwin was seriously interested in education, particularly further education.  I’m not sure if he was interested in genealogy – maybe his occupation as a registrar dulled any enthusiasm for poking round in the records.

I've discovered that researching family history is a never ending task.  Occasionally I sit back, cast an eye over the boxes and files and decide I’ve come to a natural conclusion and that it’s time to put it all down on paper in neat chronological order.  Then a snippet of additional information surfaces or more records are opened up on the internet and the chase begins again.  It’s taken a while but I’ve gradually come to realise that my work in this area will never be ‘complete’ and I need to get everything recorded before my notes (and brain) get too old, crumpled and indecipherable.

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It's character building to have a thespian in your ancestry.  Trust me.  My acting ancestors have made me laugh, cry and tear my hair out in frustration and it has nothing to do with their professional abilities!  As part of the Monday madness meme over at Geneabloggers let me share my adventures tracking down my favourite board-treader who's driven me nuts over the years.

Several factors contribute to the difficulties in searching for Victorian actors.  Using a stage name is the most obvious. Professional name and 'real' surname for some appear to have been interchangeable on official documents seemingly at whim.  Then there is mobility.  Theatre actors didn't often stay in the same venue for more than a few weeks at a time which, if they had a fairly common name, makes looking for them on a census a long winded process.  If you do manage to track them down they're often listed at the end of the household as 'Vistor' or 'Boarder' on their own and the link broken to the rest of their family.  As if that wasn't bad enough there are the age discrepancies.  Of course that can be a problem with any ancestor, transcription errors and mistakes occur regularly but with actors we have the added complication of a desire to appear a different age to their actual age.  Usually younger.

Lily Blanche was born into a family of actors.  Her father Joseph and mother Emma were both actors and by the time Lily was 10 (maybe) Joseph was manager of the Theatre Royal in West Bromwich, UK.  In 1879 Lillie Blanche made her acting debut, along with her parents and for several years is billed in The Era as 'Little Lillie Blanche'.  I can find no record of her birth and almost ever official document contradicts each other placing her birth at any time during an enormous timespan of 19 years!

Her death certificate informs us that she died in 1925 aged 56 = born 1869
The 1881 census tells us that she was aged 8 = born 1873
The 1891 census tells us that she was aged 18 = born 1873
The 1911 census tells us that she was aged 23  = born 1888  (really Lily? So you were born 7 years after the 1881 census)
Her marriage certificate states that she was 32 in 1916 = born 1884

Ahh you're saying, 1873 looks promising except that Emma, her mother was appearing in stage productions pretty consistently throughout that year.  A heavily pregnant woman acting in a Victorian play?  So maybe her parents played fast and loose with her age to the census enumerator to fit in with the 'Little Lily Blanche' tag?  I begin to wonder sometimes if they might have plucked the child from an orphanage as she seems to have appeared from nowhere.  After 1891, when she's still in West Bromwich with her parents on the census, I lost her.  She disappeared completely until by chance, I came across an article in The Era about an actress called Lillian Herries.  It said that Miss Herries came from an acting family, her mother and father being Joseph and Emma Rainbow!  I sat staring at the page..omg omg..I've found Lily!!  Without that link I would never have discovered what happened to her later in her life, when she toured in the USA and South Africa and married another actor, Vincent W. Carlyle.   I still have plenty of questions about Ms Rainbow/Herries/Carlyle that need answering.  Why did her cousin, giving information for her death certificate, say she was a spinster when she'd married only 9 years earlier?  Was she really born in Middlesbro (sic) and exactly when would that have been?

In all seriousness I've had a lot of fun tracing my acting family and there are many positives amongst the difficulties.  Once you actually find them its often possible to track them around the country as they go from town to town and each production is advertised in the local newspaper, many of which have their archives online.  Then there are the reviews where you may pick up those gems that tell you about the personality of your ancestor, and finally how brilliant is it to find a theatre poster with your ancestors' name 'in lights' – even if they are little ones.  Good luck with tracking down yours…sorry…break a leg!

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Are you boring?  Okay that was rude, of course you’re not!  Let me rephrase that.  Do members of your family suddenly find something urgent they have to do right now as you begin to tell them about your latest census find?  Do their eyes glaze over when you show them a photo of their great great grandmother’s grave?  Do you ever find yourself getting frustrated that part of your interest in genealogy stems from a desire to pass on your research to younger members of your family and NOBODY is interested?One solution is to write a book and let those frustrations just wash away.   I know it seems like a mammoth task but think about it.  You already have a lot of the basic information, the stories and the photos.  Imagine you’re writing it for a descendant yet to be born who develops a passion for genealogy.  It doesn’t have to be the best written book in the world either.  Imagine finding a book today written by your great, great grandmother.  Would you criticise it for spelling, grammar and style or would you just be blown away to discover this jewel?  I know I’ve been thrilled to discover a document containing the real signature of a distant ancestor but a book..written with me, or someone like me,  in mind?

You’re thinking that nobody would publish a book that potentially has little interest to the book buying public and that’s probably true, but these days its possible to self-publish at relatively little cost.  Web sites like lulu.com offer such a service and you can get a handful of copies printed, allow people to buy their own, even make it available on Amazon if you get an ISBN.    With epublishing and Apple inviting authors to self publish for the Ipad there is a an exciting democratisation within publishing taking place giving many more people the opportunity to share their work.

You may have the intention to write up all your work when you’ve finished your research.  This was always my plan, until I realised that this research will never be finished. Silly me! As the years go by more records are unearthed and made available and the chase resumes.  You don’t have to stop researching, just make it part of your work to, for example, write something about one ancestor every week.  Or document your research in the style of a diary.  Just a few hundred words every week and in a year or two you’ll have the ground floor of a book!   Start today!

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So you’ve decided to write up your family history are you going to include a piece about you? When I was a child my granddad told me that an ancestor had researched our family history. Recently I’ve narrowed this down to one Amy Alice Watts Rainbow, a schoolteacher, but all I’ve found, so far, is a sketchy family tree. I know nothing about the woman herself or her interest in genealogy. How wonderful it would be to find an account of her life and how she went about her research. So with this in mind I’m going to grit my teeth and write something about me as an addendum to my family history book. It seems trivial and tedious compared to stories of the ancestors but maybe in 100 years…..you get the picture?

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