My family history in 1,000 words: The story of a moonlit flit across the Thames
One dark night, sometime in early 1858, a middle-aged man and his teenaged son did a daring moonlit flit across the River Thames from Leytonstone to Sutton in Surrey, possibly by boat or maybe by hitching a lift on a cart. On the journey they changed their names and so took on a new identity, which was to stay with the family for several generations to come.
What caused this upheaval? Who was the man? And why did he have to change his name and that of his whole family?
Enter Charles Root…
The man in question was Charles Earl Root, my great-great-grandfather. Born in early
