Lost & Found – Things turn up
It made the news. Found in a Hampshire cupboard in 2006, an old book was discovered to be Robert Hooke’s minutes of the Royal Society for 1661-1682. They were not known to have survived and were valued at about million. (www.theguardian.com/science/2006/apr/01/uknews)
Then, in 2015, the 800th anniversary year of Magna Carta, a rare version of 1300 turned up in Kent County Council Archives. This document was valued at about £10 million. (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-31242433)
Even more ancient writings have turned up over the centuries. The so-called Alfred Jewel was found in 1693 in a field about three miles from Athelney, Somerset, where Alfred the Great had founded an abbey after his victories over the Vikings in the 800s AD. My husband said, ‘Why is it called the Alfred Jewel?’ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘It has ‘Alfred had me made’ around the edge, in Anglo-Saxon, in gold!’ It is now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. (ashmolean.org/alfred-jewel)
Portrait, thought to be of Robert Hooke. Hooke is renowned as the 17th century polymath who discovered the existence of biological cells. Several centuries after his death, his minutes of the Royal Society, 1662-1681, were stumbled upon in a cupboard in Hampshire
Metal detectorists turn up things all the time but most items aren’t inscribed, only adding to archaeology but not genealogy. Even the above items with writing do not tell us who the parents of our ‘brick wall’ ancestors are. How do things turn up for us?
The passage of time
If, like me, you have been tracing ancestors avidly for over 40 years, you will have come to many brick walls, now mostly set in stone. You have searched original records, transcripts, catalogues, indexes, books, journals,
