One of my hobbies is genealogy and when I had acquired a huge amount of data on my ancestors and relatives, I found myself wondering what I was going to do with it all. My daughters had also asked me to record details of my own early life, so that my grandchildren and their offspring in turn would have some knowledge of life in the late 20th Century. I decided to write as much as I knew and then took the liberty of adding a lot more that I believed might have happened, to keep my readers interested.
As they said in the old TV series Dragnet – ‘This is a true story, only the facts have been changed to protect the innocent’. Or my favourite – never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn!
I hope, through these pages, to acquaint you with the Wiltshire cattle thief, who was convicted and transported to a penal colony in Australia, where a huge branch of the family now thrives. In the “Barrows in Uniform” section, you’ll find the young Australian cavalryman, wounded storming the beach at Gallipoli in The Crimean War.
Lt. Garnet Edmund Iles Tinson (Aged 28) was taken to a Hospital Ship, but died of his grievous wounds and was buried at sea.
I apologise if some of the biographies are incomplete; this is very much a work-in-progress, research and writing are time-consuming and in all fairness, it will never be completely ‘finished’!
Princes living in the castles of South Wales fight for attention with Thames lightermen plying their trade from the Embankment Steps and Whitechapel.
The Maxwells, culminating in my great-great grandfather, came from a long line of Thames Lightermen, originally having moved down to London from the ports of Scotland to find work on the great river running through our capital.
‘Lighters’ are shallow-draft Thames barges.
When the larger vessels docked at the Thames wharves, they discharged their cargoes to warehouses along the riverbanks. From here, the goods were taken into the city or to outlying warehouses on smaller barges (lighters), capable of negotiating the narrower and shallower tributaries and canals serving the hinterland. Wapping Wharf was one of the centres for this lighter trade and this area is the focus of many of the records of the Maxwells in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The saga continues with two new generations, my own children, which I am calling the +1 generation and their children, my grandchildren, the +2 generation.
Here you’ll find their stories, written in their own style and bursting with new and accurate, up to date information (I hope). A very good place to start your exploratory journey would be in the pages detailing my personal history “Where I Am and How I Got Here”
and then going back to the start of my own life story with “The Dukinfield Years” below to navigate further.
If you’ve already been down that road, you may want to explore my closest family, my offspring in other words by following this link or this link
Read on and Enjoy.
MY LIFE STORY 