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32 Ancestors
Every person on this planet has exactly 32 great-great-great grandparents, genetically speaking. This website is my attempt to provide the human stories behind the 32 ancestors of my children’s heritage.
The Ancestor Chart is the main navigation for this website. It is always available on the main top menu. Also, buttons linking to this page are available at the foot of most pages. If you click on the name of any individual ancestor you will see a page of stories and anecdotes about that person.
Since I completed my original 32 ancestors project, I have written more articles about other members of our family. These can be read at Recent Posts.
Click on Name in Box to view Personal Story
How do we make sense of the future, if we don’t understand the past?
Introduction
When I was a young architecture student many years ago, there was a running joke that we only borrowed books from the university library if they were full of pictures. It may have been a joke, but there’s some truth in it. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why this website includes plenty of images.
The site is designed to feel more like a magazine than a book. It’s something you can dip into and explore at your own pace, rather than read from beginning to end. Its aim is to offer a light-hearted look at stories from our family’s past, not to serve as a formal academic study.
Family history can sometimes become just a collection of names and dates. While accuracy is important, I wanted this site to go further by telling the stories of the lives our ancestors lived between those dates.
Overview
Some of these stories are not easy to read. They touch on difficult subjects such as slavery, illegitimacy, colonialism, electoral fraud, bankruptcy, child abuse, mental illness, and adultery. Where I have used accounts from the time, I have chosen not to alter them to fit modern attitudes. History isn’t always comfortable, but it isn’t ours to change. It belongs to all of us.
I’m aware that other families may share some of the 32 ancestors featured here. I would be very glad to hear from anyone interested in these stories. Comments are enabled throughout the site, so please feel free to contribute, whether to add information or correct any mistakes. Comments are moderated, so there may be a short delay before they appear.
Acknowledgements
I got the idea for this website from Richard Knott who created a much more ambitious website called 64 Regency Ancestors. Our family trees overlap and he has kindly given me permission to reproduce some of the stories he researched and wrote.