To the Manor Born

In a fit of domestic avoidance last weekend, I plunged – as I do periodically – into the genealogical fray. 

In part, this was motivated by my grandmother’s bringing up for the eleventy jillionth time how she wishes she knew something about the Tatham side of the family. 


My grandmother is a Tatham.

As was her father. (Duh.) 

And his parents (Tathams too – go figure) emigrated from England in 1888 and settled variously in Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

That’s where the trail goes cold. We don’t know squat about the Tathams before they came to America.

The story goes that one of my great-grand-uncles did some research in England and then destroyed what he found. Ostensibly because there was a particularly odious sister-in-law and he didn’t want the glorious Tatham ancestry to go to her head. Personally, I suspect he found a particularly odious ancestor and didn’t want to sully the glorious Tatham reputation. 

It had been a while since I looked into the whole Tatham thing, and Sunday was rainy and cold, and like I said, I was avoiding cleaning the house.

Since the last time I checked, more records have come on line, and almost immediately I found my great-great-grandmother’s death certificate, which named her parents, which set me off on a day-long slog through various British parish records and census data as far back as the late eighteenth century.

Here’s what I found: 

• The Tatham family trees on that popular genealogy site are dead wrong.
• One great-great-great-grandmother was illegitimate (as were most of her siblings).
• Far from being those Tathams (the ones in the “landed gentry” section of Burke’s Peerage), the three generations preceding my great-grandfather were a motley collection of uneducated (and often illiterate) laborers, coal dealers, bricklayers, farmers and weavers.
• Someone with the same name and living in the same town as my great-great-great-grandfather appears twice in the court records for “shopbreaking.”

So we still don’t know for sure what the Tatham deal was, but a rough picture begins to emerge.  I'll take this over to my grandmother this weekend and see how it sets.