Jane Ellison-Bates has a fascination for all things vintage and yearned to seek back to find who had shaped her own gene pool.  Unfortunately, running her own marketing business full time and performing with a Victorian travelling players theatre group meant her time was limited.  That, coupled with the fact that she had no idea how or where to begin, meant she had resigned herself to not being able to research her family tree herself  – until she found Discover Your Roots on the internet.

With very little information to go on from her parents’ knowledge of their family history, we set about tracing back her family roots for her.

Jane and her Mum and Dad were thrilled with the discoveries we made on the way.    We have tracked her furthest ancestor back through her paternal grandmother’s line to find her great, great, great, great grandfather, Richard Todnor who was a pitman born in County Durham in 1771.

On the other side of the family, we have traced Jane’s roots across the border into Scotland, a trickier research challenge which we love, and found Charles Bern.  Born in 1826 he was a flax dresser and his job would have been to break and swingle flax to prepare it for spinning.  We know that he was living at 35 Union Street in Brechin in 1891, an address which still exists and Jane can visit to experience a very real sense of her roots.

The most amazing discovery for Jane however, lay in uncovering the fact that she has Yorkshire ancestry and that she has unwittingly returned to live in the same area.  Having grown up nearly 200 miles away in Northamptonshire with no knowledge of any Yorkshire connections, Jane moved to live near Skipton in North Yorkshire in 1990, a place she was drawn to after a childhood holiday.  Incredibly, her family tree has revealed that her maternal great great great grandparent, Joseph Geldard, was actually born in the town, along with all his children.