My interest in researching our family history began with the stories I remembered my grandmother telling me about my great-grandmother Ellen Wilson Hemingway and her family. There were things that I found to be true and other things perhaps exaggerated or attributed to the wrong person. This began my amazing journey into the past.
The life and achievements of professor Tom Kilburn and his friendship with the author’s father.
Death from poisoning was not uncommon in the days before the regulation of poisons. Arsenic trioxide (usually referred to as simply “arsenic”) was a common feature of everyday life in Victorian Britain.
Searching for Martha Arnold, who married Mirfield-born Thomas Sheard, turned up echoes of the Luddite uprising in West Yorkshire and a possible family connection.
The story of John Hemingway of Dewsbury, WR Yorkshire, who was Master Mason on the stonework of the world famous Britannia Bridge across the Menai Strait. John was a partner in Nowell, Hemingway and Pearson.
A brief history of crime and punishment from the 17th to 19th centuries. The Wakefield House of Correction, Rothwell Debtors’ Prison and York Castle Prison are highlighted. The article gives family case histories of those who skirted the edges of the law and were sometimes punished.
A look at the treatment of madness form the middle ages to the present with particular emphasis on the West Riding Asylums and individual cases from the author’s family history.
