News from the research
Discoveries, letters, new branches and gallery finds, as they happen. The reference pages hold the settled story; this is the running one. Every post can be shared straight to the family group.
Thirteen houses, twelve crowns
In the last week of July the research finished the climb it had been making all month. The summit is no longer a council of five or six crowns. It is thirteen royal houses and twelve sovereign crowns, from fifth-century Leinster to Plantagenet England, and every rung of it is graded.
28 July 2026
The three crowns of Ireland, first borne by a cousin
The three crowns that stood for Ireland were first carried on the shield of a de Vere, the family this house descends from, six hundred years before the same house was…
27 July 2026
The sixth crown, and it is Irish
The tree reached a fifth crown last week. This week it reached a sixth, and of all of them this is the one an Irish family would have wished for first: Brian Boru, Hig…
26 July 2026
The crown, honestly
The tree reached kings this week, and not one but five: the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Robert II of France and Diarmait of Leinster. Before you believe…
25 July 2026
The second anchor
Yesterday the family's Domesday claim carried one honest asterisk. Today it carries none: Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, tenant-in-chief of 1086 and joint Justicia…
24 July 2026
The other Norman line: Bunbury back to King Stephen
A quieter find than a High King, and now a deep one: the Lanes marry back into a Cheshire family whose line runs, documented, to a lord of Bunbury in the reign of King…
24 July 2026
Three roads to one baron
The paternal legend names Roger d'Amory, dead in a rebellion in 1322. My father's grandmother's tree, built independently over three weeks, has now brus…
23 July 2026
The prize
My father spent ten years hunting a thousand-year pedigree and never found it. This week, thirty-odd years after he started and two years after he died, it arrived: do…
22 July 2026
Unmarrying the founder
A deed read in full has dissolved a marriage this research itself made three weeks ago, recovered six forgotten daughters of the first Jones of Drombeg, and left the f…
21 July 2026
The ladder in the west
One week, four old books, and roughly fifty new documented ancestors on my father's grandmother's side: archbishops and innkeepers, a Jacobite baron, the man…
20 July 2026
Lunch at Sandringham
Of all the branches of this family, the Melbourne Dammerys are the one I have sat down to lunch with. A Saturday by the bay in March 2020, a cousin called Sue, and the…
18 July 2026
An old master who never existed
A new painting of the family arms in the manner of an antique watercolour, with a signature in the corner that rewards a second look.
17 July 2026
Shaw in the family album
A tall man in tweeds and a flat cap, wicker chairs on a lawn, and nothing written on the back. We think we know who he is, and what he was doing in the neighbourhood.
15 July 2026
The captain in the family
The young man standing beside his mother at the Drombeg stones grew up to command ships. In the first months of the war he fought off a Luftwaffe bomber with nothing b…
13 July 2026
The New Brunswick Damerys
Who is Greg Damery, and where does his branch fit? Loyalists out of Boston in 1783, a lumber fortune on the St. John River, and a great-uncle sent to fight within sigh…
11 July 2026
The Damerys who held the brush
The name Damery does not only appear on gallery labels as a sitter. Three times, at least, it appears as the artist: the painter brothers of Liege, a French draughtsma…
10 July 2026
There is a Damery hanging in Boston
A cousin from the Canadian branch of the name has been in touch, and he sent me something wonderful: a portrait by Greuze, painted around 1765, hanging in the Museum o…
9 July 2026
Picnics among the stones
The Drombeg stone circle has stood above Glandore for three thousand years. For one family, it was also the far field: the place you took visitors, and a picnic.
7 July 2026
A visit to Castle Freke
Two photographs from the family album record the Jones family visiting their people at Castle Freke, the great ivy-covered pile of the Evans-Frekes near Rosscarbery.
6 July 2026
Carrig Bawn, 8 April 1921
One page of the family album carries a burned-out house, a group of onlookers, and four handwritten words. It is the War of Independence, three months before the Truce.
5 July 2026