Plotting town’s history shows we are all connected
CONGRATULATIONS to The Journal on your 190th anniversary. That 200th birthday on May 13, 2032 will be some occasion. I hope I’ll be available for an invitation to the party.
Shortly after my previous column, fifth cousin John contacted me with more information from our family history, actually about people who could have seen this newspaper in its original 1832 version.
John is “the Sage of Boulmer now living in South London”. We share various great grandparents from fishing communities the length of Northumberland and he keeps me firmly on the right track.
These cousins keep popping up. Almost every week, the splendid volunteers at the Newbiggin by the Sea Family History Centre encounter more descendants of Robert Robinson and Katharine Milburne, who were married at St Mary’s Woodhorn on November 12, 1627 and who brought their son John to be baptised there, on January 24, 1629.
This is just about as far back as the local church records go. However, we can already link these great grandparents to about 25,000 grandchildren from a subsequent 15 generations.
Thousands of our cousins from hugely interlinked families still live in Northumberland, while many have moved far away, to make their own contribution to the world.
These are fisher folk not lords and ladies, but they’re just as good as anybody and an enormous family is worth celebrating. In this year of HM the Queen’s great jubilee we are going to start the five-year planning for Katharine and Robert’s 400th wedding anniversary in 2027. We envisage a grand homecoming and a huge family gathering, for generations now spread across the globe.
Our small band of volunteers have already spent 10 years recording “everyone who has ever lived in Newbiggin by the Sea”, building a huge, historic database, which as I write contains information about 36,731 people.
It’s a common saying that “iverybody in Newbiggin is related to iverybody else”, but after a great deal of effort we can demonstrate that this is substantially true. Family history easily becomes community history in close-knit, often isolated fishing villages.
All of this work is publicly available, at www. new big gin by these a community tree
Our “Community Tree” is far more than a dry list of names, there are thousands of photographs and written records and film and oral history. There are stories of people and their lives, some of them extraordinary, all of them unique. Everybody has a story to tell and over the years we have celebrated many tales in monthly meetings, books, exhibitions, events, a musical and latterly at the Family History Centre, established in 2019.
There will always be gaps and almost everyone who adds information also corrects some mistake. However, if your family have a historic connection with Newbiggin by the Sea it is highly likely that we’ll have some information about them.
Any community could do this work, but we aren’t actually aware of any others who have yet done so. Partly for that reason, mainly because the global conglomerate which hosts our “Community Tree” say they have seen “nothing like it”, we claim that we have built the largest community family history tree in the world.
I don’t really know anything about genetics, but I can imagine that a record of 15 interlinked generations must be a boon to science and research. Actually, I don’t think any of us yet understand the monster we’ve created.
Things can feel uncanny when you’re so sensitised to the legacy that we all carry from all those generations. This work takes you out of the everyday. Trying to build empathetic understanding of your own people from different times, walking the same streets, marking their lives in the churchyards at Woodhorn, or the Point, forever close to the sea.
I grew up in Newbiggin and, wherever you end up in the world, it’s a rackety old place which gets under your skin. There’s much more in our work to explore, about identity and memory and continuity over time. About the way we all live historic events.
Family history underlines that everyone is worthy of respect and everyone matters. We are all family. Everyone came to Northumberland from somewhere else, even if we’ve been here 400 years, then so many move on.
It also gives perspective. 200 years ago people moved here from east coast fishing communities all the way from northern Scotland to Suffolk. 150-160 years on we are only beginning to evaluate the impact of coal mining on Northumberland communities transformed by people coming from all over, for work.
By the time of the Journal’s 290th birthday perhaps our successors will be looking at the influence of more recent arrivals, the quality and diversity inherent in an ever more globalised world?
We aren’t just thrown into the world, to be shaped by parenting and whatever place and circumstances we grow up in. We are also part of humanity, inextricably linked by an unbroken chain to the past and to the rest of the human race. Even more than a historic newspaper, there’s nothing like a distant cousin, to help you feel you belong.
If your family have a historic connection with Newbiggin it is highly likely we’ll have some information about them