Following the Threads Through Time

My search for my ancestors did not begin with genealogy.

It began with a question.

What was the root of my childhood illness, and how did it connect with the experiences of those who came before me?

Without conscious memories of my earliest years, I found myself looking elsewhere for clues. What began as a personal search gradually became an exploration of genealogy, history, landscape and family stories, asking whether the past might illuminate experiences that words alone could not explain.

Over many years, I traced more than 1,200 ancestors. Yet the names and dates soon became secondary to a deeper question:

What do we inherit beyond our family names?

Following the Clues

As my research expanded, the focus shifted from family trees to lived experience.

I became interested in the lives my ancestors had actually lived: the relationships they formed, the hardships they endured, the beliefs they held and the ways they adapted to an ever-changing world.

Again and again, the same themes emerged.

Survival.

Displacement.

Loss.

Resilience.

Adaptation.

The search led through the aftermath of the 1607 Bristol Channel flood, the Battle of Sedgemoor, the Bloody Assizes, the transportation of Monmouth rebels and the changing fortunes of my Scottish ancestry.

History gradually became something more than background.

It became context.

When History Becomes Personal

The deeper I looked, the more history and personal experience began to reflect one another.

Some discoveries arrived through historical records.

Others emerged through standing in places where my ancestors had lived, worked and struggled.

Certain names returned again and again. Certain landscapes felt unexpectedly familiar. Certain stories seemed to illuminate patterns that had quietly shaped my own life.

Family history was no longer simply about discovering who my ancestors were.

It became an exploration of how experiences of survival, loss and adaptation may continue to influence later generations.

Walking the Landscape

The research eventually left the archive behind.

I travelled across Somerset, Cornwall, Bristol and Scotland, visiting places connected with my family story. Ancient landscapes, villages, battlefields, standing stones and family homes became part of the enquiry.

Walking these places changed the nature of the search.

The landscape itself became another source of understanding, inviting questions that could never have emerged from documents alone.

More Questions Than Answers

This work has never been about proving a theory.

It has been about following questions wherever they lead.

How do family stories shape identity?

How do historical events influence later generations?

What patterns do we inherit through relationships, culture and adaptation?

And how do we recognise those patterns when they quietly appear within our own lives?

The Journey Continues

Ancestral enquiry became one of the hidden threads running through One True Story: Five Books.

What began as a search for the origins of my own childhood illness eventually became something much broader: an exploration of memory, history, relationships and the remarkable ways seemingly unrelated experiences can come together to reveal a deeper pattern.

The answers did not lie in any single ancestor or historical event.

They emerged gradually, one clue at a time.

The final pieces of that journey are explored in Once the Fair Goes, where the story returns to the place it began.