Who Do You Think You Are?
Isn’t the new series of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ great?
Last week with Patsy Kensit delving into her father and grandfather’s criminal records and going on to discover her ‘honest upright’ folk from Kent that finished walking sticks for a living until the trade disappeared.
Then there was her ancestor the Rev James Mayne, a noble and tireless Victorian curate of St Matthew’s Church in Bethnal Green honoured with a ‘Lambeth MA’; a degree that the programme taught me the existence of for the first time. But what I empathised with here was the Catholic Kensit discovering her Protestant churchman ancestor. I have similarly been intrigued to find that my Catholic maternal grandmother was descended, on her Scottish fathers’ side, from an Episcopalian Bishop! We have to go all the way back to the 1680’s for his birth and to 1727 for the period when he was Bishop of Brechin, then Dunkeld in Scotland, but all the same…a Bishop! Not just a Bishop, but from 1739 to 1743 the Primus of Scotland and all the while the 20th laird of Craighall-Rattray with a castle in Perthshire.
This then echoes some of the second episode featuring Boris Johnson. In his travels he finds he is descended from a German Baron, who’s wife was illegitimate daughter of a Prince with a fabulous castle. In my travels I found that my Scottish ancestors, unlike my English ones, were almost all gentry with the daughter of the Bishop marring a Baronet. I too found other castles in the family, although not of the magnificence of the one Mr Johnson found, but all the same thrilling to me.
I love this family history experience!