Coins

Great to find Criminal Records at www.ancestry.co.uk, especially as my stepmother's erstwhile ancestors appear in more than one as counterfeiters of coins. Ten years in prison for James Sweetman and then a desperate time in the local workhouse for his four children...

More map fun

Family historians are a funny lot. Who else would get excited by the arrival of a death certificate?

I ordered one last week from GRO for my great x 5 uncle (we weren't close, don't worry) John Bates who died in Hackney in 1838 ( I gleaned that from his will). I only discovered he existed beyond the baptismal register last year and was thrilled to find he moved south from Norfolk and made a life for himself as a cabinet maker in east London (quite rural Middlesex in those days).

So, John - born in 1768 in rural Norfolk and the second son of my great x6 grandparents (John Bates, shoemaker and his wife Mary Dunnell) ended his days at 2 Coleharbor Street, in the subdistrict of Hackney Road in Bethnal Green. Aged 70 years he had succumbed to 'decay of nature' (don't we all?) and died at the home of his only surviving daughter, Ann Pank.

Again using Greenwood's amazing map and A Topographical Dictionary of London and its Environs by James Elmes (handily readable due to the wotsit on Google) I can place the street in modern times as under a basketball court immediately south of Bethnal Green itself. It must have been a very different place 181 years ago.

I'm sure my lot would be classed as 'boring' by the Who Do You Think You Are gang (as were Michael Parkinson's) but I still get excited when I find out a bit more about one of them.