My Ancestors

Not having – at least as far as I am currently aware – any famous ancestors, the closing words of George Eliot’s Middlemarch have always struck a chord…

‘… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

… and then in the curious way in which these things play upon our minds, this gave me the notion of trying to visit and photograph the graves of as many of my direct ancestors as pssible. A lovely example is the grave of my 5 x great grandparents Christopher QUICKFALL (1739-1824) and his wife Mary QUICKFALL (nee BUTTON) (1744-1835). Their two graves nestle close beside St Peters in the Lincolnshire village of Great Limber and I visited them on a cold March morning in 2022.

Christopher and Mary were married for 56 years and had 9 children. The children were born between 1768 and 1789, with about 3 years between each, with just one exception. Jemima was baptised in February 1780 but then buried just 6 weeks later. My 4 x great grandfather Thomas was baptised the following February. Just another instance of where things could so easily have turned out very differently for me. I know nothing about them as a couple. The parish registers dutifully record the names and dates of their life events, but nothing more, not even an occupation.

Not all ancestors have graves that are as easy to locate as these. My great grandfather Joshua Whitley Gill CLARK (1855-1901) was buried in Cleethorpes cemetery, and now lies somewhere under a tennis court size patch of roughly mown grass, punctuated by just half a dozen, leaning stones. Earlier this year a very kind cemetery attendant let me into his site office whilst he consulted his database and more detailed hard copy schedules and then, using the extant stones, helped me pace out the position of my great grandfather’s final resting place.

what3words.com gives a unique combination of 3 words to each 3 square metre. I love the poetic possibilities this offers. Christopher and Mary are at the evocatively named corkscrew.epidemics.workloads, whilst Joshua is buried at timing.congratulations.cafe. Another pair of great grandparents, William BEVERS and Eliza Harriet BEVERS (nee HASTE) are at the wonderful burial location of kind.mixed.softly.

The majority of us have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so on. Even if each couple were buried next to each other like Christopher and Mary, that would, by my reckoning at least, give a total of 127 sites to visit. Time to get out there and explore.