Introducing Harry - the bigamist! 1940 the story begins

So I guess by now you are wondering who is the infamous bigamist? Well, Harry Butterworth is his name and he is the handsome suave chap on the left in Rochdale with my father Malcolm Butterworth as a toddler. (Malcolm has just turned a youthful 70 and is still looking good!)

So this would have been about 1940...but Harry already had an eye for the girls as the letters from the past will reveal...Not only that but we have discovered and revealed on the last Anne Diamond show (21.9.09) that Harry was a bit of a fibber!

He made up his qualifications as a civil engineer, he changed the date on his birth certificate using lanry bleach ( a precursor of tippex) and he used different names - Henry David Butterworth and David Henry and Harry being the 3 we know about!

There is plenty more we are discovering about Harry and his naughty pastimes...follow the blog to find out more gossip from the past....

Suffragettes unite!

We are discovering fascinating facts - sometimes not what we expect - Florence Clegg. my great-Grandmother, the possible suffragette may, or may not, have been active at the time.

Some suffragettes boycotted the census and Florence's name was on the 1911 census when Emmeline Pankhurst's campaigning was at its height. She campaigned in Rochdale and Manchester and a lot of mill girls supported her. As Florence was a teacher she may have taught mill girls who were sympathisers. However, we discovered Florence definitely had colleagues at Whitelands College in London - the first teacher training college in the UK - who were likely to be active. Their drawings in Florence's beautiful book from 1901 show symbols of the suffragettes - lilies and women dressed in purple robes.

Florence moved from Rochdale to London - an Edwardian Sloane Ranger! Whitelands College was just off the Kings Road - like my Grandmother, my Aunt and myself who all gravitated to London from Rochdale - how strange that these patterns of behaviour develop without us really knowing why...

This whole process is very strange - I find myself awake at night wondering about all these people I am connected with but do not know...it's as if a whole line of ancestors are standing in a queue waiting for me to ask them questions! And after a fantastic spiritual healing session recently (my Grandmother Olive Butterworth was a real fan of this too!) l am wondering if this experience could get even more spooky....

Research starts in earnest

Well research has taken up a lot of time - visiting the Berkshire Family History society where Derek and Jocie helped me begin to decipher and put together the jigsaw of my family's history with incredibly clever detective work. I got special treatment as it was for the BBC of course! Jocie has over 10,000 contacts on her family tree - I think they should be interviewing her!

So what secrets will the little battered suitcase of letters and memories reveal in the coming weeks?