Italian Roots and Genealogy
This podcast is dedicated to Italian Genealogy, finding your Italian Roots and how to navigate through Italian records. Your host has over 12 years of experience and we will have excellent guests that will discuss a variety of genealogy topics. Please subscribe!
Italian Roots and Genealogy
Unearthing Surprising Lineages and Family Secrets
Could DNA testing revolutionize your understanding of family history? Join us as we uncover this fascinating topic with Andrew Martin, host of the Family Histories Podcast. Andrew’s unique show format, born out of the UK's lockdown in 2021, includes an interview, a life story, and a genealogical brick wall challenge. He shares how his creative process turned isolation into an opportunity for connection within the genealogy community. We also explore the joys and hurdles of guest interviews and the thrill of forging new relationships with fellow genealogy enthusiasts.
Ever wondered if your ancestors had secrets? Listen to stories of unexpected lineage discoveries, from a London genealogist who unearthed a new Churchill branch to a Swedish researcher uncovering an ancestor’s secret life in the US. We discuss the revolutionary impact of DNA testing on family history research, covering the diverse practices between British and Italian families. I also share a personal anecdote about uncovering my own family's struggles, drawing connections to the economic issues we face today.
Serendipity in family history can lead to extraordinary revelations. Hear about chance encounters that shaped destinies, like my great-grandparents' marriage that almost didn’t happen, and a grandfather who left the seminary after a fateful meeting. We navigate the complexities of family roots, sharing a remarkable story of a five-times great-grandfather who emigrated to the USA in his late 60s. Plus, get a sneak peek into Series 8 of Andrew's podcast and enjoy a light-hearted discussion on his Scandinavian and Viking ancestry. Tune in for a captivating exploration of the unpredictable and enthralling world of genealogy.
Turnkey. The only thing you’ll lift are your spirits.
Farmers and NoblesRead about my research story and how to begin your family research.
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Hi everyone, this is Bob Sorrentino from Italian Roots and Genealogy. Be sure to check out our blog and our YouTube channel and our great sponsors, your Dolce Vita Italy, rooting Phil Italy and Abiativa Casa. And today my guest is Andrew Martin, who has a great podcast of his own dedicated to genealogy. So welcome, andrew. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:Hello Bob, it's an absolute pleasure to talk to you.
Speaker 1:Yes, and we spoke a couple of weeks ago when I was a guest on your show, so we're going to follow up and get people to know your show, hopefully. So, before we start, the first and most important question is what is the name of your podcast?
Speaker 2:The name of my podcast is handily the Family Histories Podcast.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it's a great podcast. It is a little bit switch for me because typically we go into. You know we talk about Italian genealogy, but to me, you know, all genealogy is important and you know my kids are adopted, so my daughter has a lot of English and French roots and my son has some Spanish and Puerto Rican roots, so it's always great to talk about these mixtures. So I'd like to ask you, because I know you have a unique way of starting your interview, so why don't you talk? I know you have like three components of the interview, so why don't you tell people about how that works?
Speaker 2:Well, the Family Histories podcast is currently recording its eighth series and the format of each episode is pretty much the same, where I have a guest on and I interview them for about 20 minutes in the first part, then there's a middle part where they tell a life story of someone that they find fascinating in the middle section of the show for about 20 minutes again, and then the third part of the show. They share one of their brick walls and we've all got really irritating, annoying, lingering, pesky brick walls. So they get to almost like with blogging, where you do what some people call cousin bait, where you write about your brick wall and then maybe in years and years in the future someone will message you go, oh, we're related and it will solve your brick wall. But this is in a podcast and audio format. Share their brick wall. They kind of say where they've got up to, maybe some of what they've tried to solve, and they kind of leave the listeners with a little challenge at the end of the episode.
Speaker 2:And when that bit's done, I avoid the usual, what I feel is usual, slightly awkward ending to a podcast episode of yeah, thanks for coming on. Oh, no, it's great. Oh, you hang up. No, you hang up that kind of thing and I script a little set of lines and for the listeners it sounds like they are following me through to my garage where we unveil a time machine and I pop the guest into my secret time machine and I zap them back in time so they can go and solve their brick wall for themselves or at least that's what it sounds like, because I have lots of sound effects and funny lines to say and it just ends with the guest being zapped and the listeners can imagine what happened next.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that was a really fun ending. It was certainly interesting and different because I end like you said goodbye go, you hang up, you hang up. So it is yeah.
Speaker 2:There's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1:So you know what prompted you to start the series in the first place.
Speaker 2:You know what prompted you to start the series in the first place? Well, I started it in 2021. And in the UK we'd had a series of lockdowns because of, obviously, covid pandemic. And I woke up one February morning a nice morning, which is quite unusual for February here but I woke up and I just thought I'm going to do a podcast and I thought what do I need to do this? And I realized I already had the equipment.
Speaker 2:So I had this microphone and the pop shield and the computer that could do it and I thought, ok, I've got a kind of creative format that I could do with this time machine and the life story and the brick wall, and I knew that I could do that based on that format and that equipment. But then I think there's also an element because we'd been through a pandemic and because we'd had gone through all of these lockdowns and I live by myself I think it was probably an element of kind of loneliness in this as well, and so it was a way of solving that as well. It enabled me to talk to people I'd never spoken to, like yourself, bob, and a whole load of other guests I've had on the show. So it kind of solved all of those things gave me a creative output and a bit of fun and got me speaking to people and a bit of fun and got me speaking to people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know it's interesting about that book, because people say to me how do you just, you know, find these people? And you just talk to people you don't know, and I to me, I find that so interesting. So so, how do you find your guests? I know how I find. I guess I go around and pester people, but how do you find your guests?
Speaker 2:Gosh, don't tell my mom I talk to strangers. Gosh, you'll be going crazy. It's like all the against all the parenting advice you could ever give. Uh, I literally talk to strangers. Uh, no, I in the first series I asked I mean there's seven episodes per series, or maybe I should say season, because I think american audiences certainly would would go for seasons rather than series, but seven episodes in a season.
Speaker 2:And I think in that first season I asked probably about three people that I knew. And those people were ones that I had met in person at conferences like the who Do you Think you Are, events in London and Birmingham and the genealogy shows and things like that. People that I knew and that I had got to know through social media, particularly through Twitter and a little bit through Facebook as well. So I knew some of them. And then, because I am quite active on Twitter, a long time before having this podcast, I was just kind of picking up on different topics and different people and trying to identify what kind of things that they seem to specialize in or what kind of areas do they research in typically that were maybe different from how I've researched or the areas that I research in. So I was using that and then I just reached out to them and for those seven guests in that first series, they were very brave.
Speaker 2:That's all I can say. For me to say, hey, would you like to be on this podcast? Most of you don't have a clue who I am. We've never spoken before, I've never met before and there's a weird format and I'm going to script you some lines which I want you to say back to me and I'm going to zap you back in time and they all, very thankfully, said yes and I recorded with them. And since then it's got a little bit easier, because there are some people who come to me and say Andrew, I'd like to be on your show, I'd really like to be a guest. I get publishers come to me and say, oh, we've got an author whose book's coming out and that kind of thing, and so I kind of field these different requests as well as my wishlist, which is quite long, for guests, and approach them directly.
Speaker 1:So it's a bit of a mixture based on the kind of combination of different stories I think I'm going to get for a series the kind of combination of different stories I think I'm going to get for series, yeah, and you know, I started pretty much the same way. I went out to friends or a couple of relatives just to practice it, and when I go back and listen to the first ones, I'm like, oh my God, I was horrible and I would talk too much. My wife told me you talk too much, you need to let the guests talk. So I've kind of I've kind of grown into it, if you, if you want to look at it that way, so let's let's talk about it.
Speaker 2:You're doing very well, as as as as one host to another, Bob, you're doing very well, and it is difficult, if you're a host being on someone else's podcast, to shut up and listen. It is very tough to do that.
Speaker 1:No, I hear you, I hear you. Uh, so let's talk about the components, because I I think the way you structured it is is pretty neat. So, um, let's talk about the interview and some of the guests, what you know.
Speaker 2:If you could give me a couple of the guests that you found the most interesting, yeah, well, one of the guests I've got, which is a series four episode called the Unexpected, I talk to a genealogist who's been a genealogist for many decades called Elsa Churchill.
Speaker 2:She is the genealogist at the Society of Genealogists in London, at the Society of Genealogists in London, and she talks about how her decades of researching her Churchill ancestors and obviously she's got some British Churchills that she's very much aware of in history she's researching her branch and then she decides to take a DNA test and that changed everything from a genealogy point of view. It came back with an unexpected set of results that kind of opened up a whole new branch that she had no idea of. So it's an interesting episode from my point of view because this DNA has completely changed her family history research. You know it has given her this other branch to go research, but it's very different from my own backgrounds in that you know I haven't been researching as long as she had, but I haven't had a DNA set of results that's changed the biological path I thought was correct. Yeah, and that's interesting.
Speaker 1:That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so speaking to Elsa was very interesting. We also spoke in that series for to a Swedish genealogist called Linda Kvist, and she talks about how she uncovered an ancestor who was believed to have died. He was a Swedish man and he had gone to the US and it was believed that he had gone to board the boat back to Sweden and he died on the dock. And so everyone thought you know he's dead, but you know where on earth is he buried? And through her research she discovers that he didn't die on the dock. He carried on living for several years in this kind of second or undead life that he had. So it, you know, all of these stories are fascinating to uncover, um, particularly when you, when you find something very different like that yeah, that that is something you know.
Speaker 1:my, my cousin, who we years, I mean we didn't know who each other were, although we grew up not far from each other in New York. She found out that her grandmother and she she doesn't. All she knows is that she bought her the trip. She bought her the boat to Italy to go back home with her husband and never got back to Italy and there's no record. I mean you have to assume that she fell off the ship, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:That's all Died at sea, something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's all anybody really knows. And you know, did she fall over? Did something else happen? You know they don't know, but DNA is interesting because you know Italians don't do a lot of DNA. So how about the British? Is it usual or unusual for them to do DNA testing?
Speaker 2:I think it's quite common for the British to do DNA testing. We kind of, I think, geographically we as an island that has invaded, colonized but traded as well, it's colonized but traded as well and a very kind of geographical closeness to Europe and Scandinavia, but also lots of immigration to different countries as well. I think there's lots of British people who want to know how they are connected to the world around them or how that world connects to them. I guess you could say so.
Speaker 2:I think it is quite common for British family historians to do DNA testing and also because we're kind of in, we're kind of central in Europe and we get a lot of American family history content as well, I think that helps with the different DNA tests too. So you know, we obviously get ancestry. That helps with the different DNA tests too. So you know, we obviously get ancestry. We get my heritage, 23andme living DNA, find my past via them. So we get all of these different tests. So the family historians who I know here in the UK, I don't think I know anyone who hasn't done DNA testing and most of those, I would imagine, has probably done more than one test as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did. I did too. I did ancestry and I did living DNA because I figured, since they were based in Europe, I would get more hits on the Italian. But the Italians don't do it, and I and I I think I've talked to some of them, because most of them not most of them, but a lot of them now they're still living or still have ties to a town where their family lived three, four or five hundred years ago. So they don't. They could just go to the cemetery and find everybody yeah, and that's pretty much the same for me.
Speaker 2:My, my family, have lived in cambridgeshire, which is a county in england in the southern part of england, well, kind of midlands of England, and they have been there for about 400 years. And I mean there's a couple of branches that go to neighbouring counties but you know, it's not very far at all, it's, you know, 40 minutes in the car or something, and they don't stray very far. And so when I'm going through the parish registers looking for, say, my surname of Martin, I can look down the parish registers and I'm going right, okay, paternal, paternal, paternal paternal. And in amongst them I'll go okay, maternal, paternal, maternal, paternal maternal. They're all there together, they all knew each other, which is slightly alarming, but it's very easy from a family history point of view for me and I think I'm very lucky in that respect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. You know, one of the easier things when you're researching Italian ancestors is that the women don't change their names. So even today they don't take the husband's name. So it's easy in a lot of respects to do that. So the next section that you talk about is a life story. So what's your life story? What have you found interesting in your family going back three, four or 500 years?
Speaker 2:Well, I have found rioters which I. These are rioters in the early 19th century. They are rioting because of an increase in the cost of living, essentially, which right now is quite familiar I don't know to the same respect, but the topic is quite familiar and it's the cost of living that's affected by the cost of food, by wages and also environmental factors because of a volcano that erupts in Indonesia. So it's all kind of related to that. So I've got rioters. I've got several different rioters. There's also ones who riot about being undercut because they were silk weavers and they travel to a few villages away and destroy their silk looms and obviously end up going through the, through the justice system for that. But yeah, so there's a lot of rioters, but I will behave. And there are other ones.
Speaker 2:One of the stories that that I found in my, in my tree, is about my, about my great-grandmother, and it's one of those kind of demonstrations of the kind of fork in the road moments that we're presented multiple times a day in our daily lives. And she was one of about five children or six in total, and her father died when she was about four. Six in total, and her father died when she was about four and her mother was pregnant with their youngest child and this mother, a young widow with five, soon to be six, children. She had to make a decision but thankfully, her sister, her married sister, lived in a town in Cambridgeshire called Littleport and they had a big shirt factory that opened and it was all new, being set up and these people were advertising for, I think, uh, respectable young ladies and women to come and work in the shirt factory where they would be making shirts, making buttonholes, sewing, ironing those kinds of things.
Speaker 2:And she just took that decision to go and move to the same place where her sister was living and then her daughters, who were now kind of growing up, they were working in the shirt factory and that shirt factory was a kind of a big employer in Victorian England and the building is still there but the factory is not because the factory, which was called Hope Brothers, which is a beautiful name, it eventually got sold to Burberry's, which is still a brand today which some of your listeners may be familiar with, that fashion brand and you know it basically changed their lives.
Speaker 2:It brought income to women and girls in the area in this kind of deeply rural Fenland area that would otherwise be domestic servants, housewives. You know it enabled them to have that independence and freedom and their own income. And so you know it was a big decision that she made, but she did it and it enabled her to have some independence, and her daughters too. And had she have not done that, that then my great grandmother would not have met my great grandfather and got married in that uh town church and I would not be here now.
Speaker 1:Yeah isn't that funny that how that works. My, my grandfather, uh, was studying to be a priest, was studying to be a priest and the story is that he was outside the seminary one afternoon, I guess one morning, and my grandmother's carriage broke down because she came from a fairly well-off family. He helped repair the carriage, they gave him a ride someplace and he left the seminary. And I wish you you know one of the things you know when you talk about brick walls and go back. One of the thing I think that makes us all nuts is a is the story true, uh and uh, you know I I think about, in my grandmother's case, because of the family that she came from he was studying police that they couldn't have been very happy about this marriage.
Speaker 1:My children are adopted and I've been able to trace my daughter back to England and she had some fascinating things, and one of them is she's a distant, distant, distant dispenser. She's a distant, distant, distant dispenser. But have you had anybody that has either ties to the States or gateway ancestors to the States? Have you run across that in your pursuits?
Speaker 2:I have an unexpected one in that and I don't know how many greats this is, so I'm going to say five greats could be wrong. I think it's five greats. And I had this uh ancestor who was however many greats grandfather, and he goes missing and I thought, oh, he's died. And you know, he, he kind of goes missing when he's about I think his late sixties, and I was thinking, okay, he's, you know, he's died in the 1870s, 1880s, something like that, and he's vanished. I can't maybe, you know, I just haven't found the record. I haven't found the parish record, or he's just recorded in a random parish that I haven't yet looked at, or I've missed over it. So I was looking for him and he had the name of James Simpson Bishop. However, sometimes he is Simpson Bishop, samson Bishop, samson Bishop, samuel Bishop, j Bishop and JS Bishop.
Speaker 2:So very difficult to find the right one, and so there were lots of false positives. So I'd find someone else's ancestor and not mine, and then I spotted a passenger list and this I should say that this five times great grandfather had about at different times. He had a total of about four wives, and so he had lots of children, maybe 15 or 16 children in total and his last marriage had taken him from the Fenland County of Cambridgeshire in kind of the South Midlands of the UK and it had taken him up to the cotton mill industry in Lancashire. So lots of employment opportunities but lots of hard work as well, dangerous work as well, in the cotton mills. And he's had this marriage to this fourth wife and she turns up in the censuses and he doesn't, and that's why I thought he had died.
Speaker 2:But interestingly, when I kept looking at this I then realised that she said that she was married and he was missing. So I looked for all of the children and tried to kind of document where they were going and I spotted that the oldest daughter from the first marriage had emigrated to the USA and accompanying them was him. He was there, the father was with them, so this daughter had got married, she'd had about two or three children by that point and they'd gone over to the US and he'd gone with them. I was watching to see whether he would come back and I didn't find it. And I noticed that by about 1901 or maybe the 1891 census, one of those two, the fourth wife, then says widow on her census return. I thought, okay, is this a case of you know, the seven years separation, so she can kind of say that it's a divorce, because divorce would still be quite difficult at that point to get. So she just said widow to kind of accept the end of that. Or has he actually died and she is the widow?
Speaker 2:And what I found was was that he had been in the US for long enough that he naturalized in his late 60s, in 1886, I think something like that. And yeah, he was there and I think he's. I think they were in Illinois somewhere, I can't remember the exact place name, but he was there and he was there with the older daughter and her family. And so I like to think that I have an American five times great grandfather, which is kind of fun to say because it's very different from the Fenland life that he would have known and that a lot of his children know, because I descend from his oldest child from his first marriage who stayed in those Fenland villages. So it's fun to say that I have this American five times great grandfather.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I see, and that's what I'm talking about. You know, why did he go? You know, did he have a fight with his wife? Did the daughter come in? It's so interesting. Yeah, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, and you know, it may well have been that their relationship ended, they just got to the end of their relationship and and he went with the daughter and she stayed with the youngest of the children, because the oldest of the children were, you know, getting married and having their own children by now. Uh, or did he go with her for a while, travel with this, with this daughter, for a while and intend to come back but actually thought, no, I'm going to stay here and naturalise, because that's obviously an indicator of intent. To stay is to have been there for however many years it is I can't remember how many it is and to naturalise. I've seen the document and, yeah, I wonder whether their relationship just failed. They couldn't afford a divorce, so they kept apart for a number of years and she stayed in Lancashire until she died.
Speaker 1:So that's, that's. That's such a great story, such a great story. So now the last, the last section that you kind of do before you go in the time machine is is the brick wall. So I'm going to ask you do you have a brick wall?
Speaker 2:I do. I actually have because my podcast has a time machine. I was able to engineer a situation where I was a guest on my own podcast and for this one episode the time machine in the previous episode right in the last few minutes, the time machine in the previous episode, right in the last few minutes the time machine goes wrong and it somehow flips me into like a kind of alternate version where I've got where I'm now the guest on this podcast and I've got this guest host, dr Vanda Viporska. She is the host in this alternate version of reality and so she interviews me as the guest. So in this episode, which is called the Rioter, she talks to me and I reveal my brick wall, and my brick wall is one that has been bugging me for wall is one that has been bugging me for I don't know 15 years perhaps, and it's one where I really want to kill off my however many greats again, sorry I forgot, but however many greats grandmother and her name's Mary Clark.
Speaker 2:And the reason I am so desperate to kill her off is because she played the archetypal wicked stepmother to her husband's children, and there's lots of very long court reports where these children, who were only kind of seven and eight, about that kind of age. They're standing up in court, undoubtedly with her in the room as well, and giving evidence to say just how she was physically abusive to them, so how she would push them to the floor and how she would not give them food, and how her children would be treated well. And these would be the children that she had with their father. So you know she was his second wife, uh, so those children would be treated very well, but his children from his first marriage were treated very poorly. So it is simply because she is such a horrible piece of work that I'm desperate to kill her off.
Speaker 1:That's Cinderella, that's like it sounds like it's right, that's unbelievable. So about what year was that when they they they had to go to court? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I smelt a rat in about kind of 1841 when I could find the children and they were scattered, and if you were a child you were kind of taught different skills. So these children start turning up there. I was like, why are they not with their parents? And then I find their father and I find the mother, and the mother is my ancestor, this wicked stepmother, and she's in the jail in Ipswich in Suffolk in England and she's there with her youngest child. And so I was able to then track back to find this big newspaper report with the court appearance, and it is a big report, and I was able to then find the kind of jail admissions book as well, a scan of that, and it showed that she was sentenced to I think six months, and two months of that was with hard labour.
Speaker 2:So that would have been rightly horrible for her to go through. But because she had this small child I think her name was Emily who was just a few months old, the child had to go there as well. So you know, a very odd start to Emily's life. But she had to be with her mother to make sure that she got the care that she needed, I guess whilst her mother was imprisoned and receiving hard labour. The father, who was guilty too for neglect. He was going to prison for, I think, only about two months and like one month of that was hard labor. So he, despite being the father and him being found guilty of neglect, he got off rather lightly really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, I find that fascinating because you don't think about that happening almost 200 years ago, that they put people in jail for things like that. That's really something, and you know sad and thankfully they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, boy, that's some story, but like I said when you were talking about it.
Speaker 1:I kept thinking about it. This is Cinderella's mother or stepmother. Maybe she was the prototype. I don't know who wrote the story or who wrote the book, but there must have been more women like that, I guess, or whatever back then, oh yeah, I'm sure it wasn't unique. Yeah, because a lot of women died in childbirth or there was lots of other stuff going on and men would marry just to have somebody to watch. They'd take care of the kids and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it kind of gets exposed because the villagers where they lived they kept seeing the children from this first marriage around the village in rags and I think one of them in the court describes them as kind of living skeletons and they would see them around the village in all weather. So they approached them and asked them what was wrong, and so these girls very bravely told them what was wrong and obviously then had to go through the, through the court and recount it all. But yeah, I mean she rightly went to prison, absolutely, and that's why I'm desperate to kill her off, because she's just a nasty bit of work.
Speaker 1:I'm not proud of her at all uh, no, yeah, I have a couple of. I have a couple of those in mind way, way back, uh, you know, uh, through my grandmother's family, uh, my paternal grandmother and and those people who was killing off who, and whose brother was murdering who, and all this kind of stuff. Um, so, so, um, you know, some some advice for people starting out. What would you suggest? The people who are just starting out doing their own research?
Speaker 2:When I started out I was a teenager and a late teenager and that was in a time where we had dial-up internet and we had lots of telephone directories and people wrote letters. So the place that I started was writing letters to distant relatives and quizzing my parents as to what they knew, and even if they just knew a little tiny bit, I would write that down. So write down everything and contact those distant relatives. And I found that if I wrote to the distant relatives and by this I mean kind of second cousins, great aunts, great uncles, that kind of distance and if I wrote to them I would nearly always get a reply. I would draw a family tree as much as I knew for their bit of the family and send it to them. Because I learned that if you present some wrong information to not intentionally, but if you send some wrong information to a distant relative, they're going to write back and say, no, actually it's this and they're giving you gold. At that point you know that's what you want. You want to be corrected with the facts that they're going to give you. But sometimes they would also give you photographs, and sometimes those photographs would be of your close relatives, because those people would be distant and this and this may be from a time where they had photographs taken and then they would send them out to their cousins or their great aunts, who were perhaps living away or perhaps just they didn't see them very often, but they would be from your close relatives and they might be pictures of your close relatives.
Speaker 2:So it was very useful for kind of getting photographs and getting trees and getting trees corrected and giving you more clues to then research in the archive. So would, whilst the dial-up days with the bleeping modems and uh are kind of behind us, as affectionate as I am to them. But uh, uh, yeah, I'm glad we passed that, uh, whilst you've got these distant relatives around, you write to them because whilst you're going to get this family history information and these photographs, it's going to be really good. But I also found that it also, in my opinion, helped to kind of bring the family closer, because you know time, time can get allow families to drift apart and you know, maybe, maybe, maybe a grandparent dies and you lose track of their nieces and nephews or you know their siblings' family basically. But if you can identify them and write to them, it can help bring them back together again and then you might get kind of a collective approach to doing your family history.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's what happened to me with my cousin Linda, because she had photographs of you, photographs of my dad's family, that I had never seen. But what possessed you, as a teenager, to embark on this journey?
Speaker 2:Well, a whole ton of curiosity, but that's because I came home from school one day, obviously living at home at this time as a teenager. I came home from school one day and there was a piece. At this time, as a teenager, I came home from school one day and there was a piece of paper on my parents' dining table and it had. I recognised it straight away as a family tree and I was looking at it and it said Martin family. And I looked at it and I thought why is this guy married to the wrong, married to not my grandmother? And then I started looking at it a bit more and I was thinking well, I don't recognize any of these people on this piece of paper. Who are they?
Speaker 2:And so I asked my mother and she said oh yeah, your uncle came around. This is my dad's brother came around and he brought this family tree and these are all your relatives. And from that moment on I thought, well, I'm going to find out who all those people are. And on that tree were my great grandparents, one of whom was the person who I just told you about, about moving to the shirt factory. She was on there and I had no idea what her name was, and yet she was my great grandmother.
Speaker 1:Yeah, see, these things don't happen by accident. There was a reason for him to come there with that tree so you could find everybody else. Isn't that funny how?
Speaker 1:that stuff works out out, absolutely yeah it's uh been a tick tick since uh, no, I know we all get I. There's one or two of us loonies in every family that has to find out all of this stuff, which which I think is which I think is good, because I I truly believe that there's I don't know force or whatever, but they want to be found. I really truly believe that. I don't know why, but that's the way I feel. So this has been great, andrew. I appreciate it. So where can people find? Once again, where can people find the podcast? And for those listening who haven't heard it yet, I'm going to be coming on soon, right.
Speaker 2:Yes, you are. There's a spoiler there, bob. Yes, you will be in the new series and I'm looking at the first week of November for Series 8. That seems to it's on target for that. So I think we'll be the first week of November 2024. And we'll be going live with season eight. And the best place to find it if you go to familyhistoriespodcastcom, then you'll find all the latest updates. You can hear all of the previous episodes. You know this is our. This will be our eighth series. We've released episodes with 49 different guests so far, so you know we'll be adding another seven to that soon, so they're mounting up. So there's plenty of episodes for people to listen to on different topics, and we have guests who talk about family history from loads of different countries around the world on different topics, and we have guests who who talk about family history from loads of different countries around the world with different backgrounds. Uh, so yeah, hopefully, hopefully they'll enjoy it.
Speaker 1:And, and I liked the way you have an index too, cause you, you, um, you have keywords for different things to be able to, whether it's by country or whether it's by different categories that people could hone in on and find something great to listen to. Well, thanks again, Andrew. I really appreciate you taking the time. This has been fascinating. You know, like you, I love to hear these stories.
Speaker 2:It's been an absolute joy, Bob, to take part in this podcast and for you to very kindly invite me on, without any Italian ancestry that I know of yet.
Speaker 1:But I will let you know if I find any. There's got to be a Roman back there somewhere.
Speaker 2:Well, I've got lots of Scandinavian DNA, so I'm not too sure about that. Maybe some Vikings, maybe that's where the writing comes from, I don't know, but my Viking blood. But, yeah, no Italians yet, I'm afraid.
