Truer than fiction...book that mirrors my family saga

I DON’T have much time for this ancestry business.

Unlike Mrs R, who is passionate about her forebears and discovered more skeletons in the family cupboard than in Kildwick churchyard.

They include a grandfather who lived in Hermit Hole, Keighley, but not very monklike, having several marriages.

I go back two generations and then it’s a mystery. My father Harry was born in Wakefield and his father Jack in Chesterle-Street. The family came south from Co Durham to the Yorkshire coalfield some time after the turn of the 19th century.

Grandfather Jack was a winding engineman in collieries around Castleford and his wife was called Elsie.

So far, so good. But a new novel, A Miner’s Lass, by Sunderland’s Glenda Young, uncannily tracks my family history.

It’s the life-and-love story of young Ruby Dinsdale and Elsie, her mother, a matriarch who holds the family together. I can just hear my grandmother talking.

What’s more, Ruby’s father and brother work at Ryhope colliery. Amazing.

Records unearthed by Mrs R’s sister show that my great-great-somethingfather was a manager at the same pit.

Joseph Routledge is listed as the holder of a first-class certificate of competence as a manager of mines in 1873, working at Ryhope at least until 1881.

The colliery, once employing 2,500, closed in 1966. During its 103-year history, 295 men and boys died in accidents.

The Routledges lived at Stob Hill House, Ryhope (still there, I wonder?). They even had a servant, Ann Kirk. We seem to have come down in the world since then.

■ Your diarist is now hanging up his quill pen until the New Year. Sithee!