June Newsletter: We’re Not From Where We Think We Are

Hello all,

So, it’s June – probably the most popular month in Victorian times for wedding nuptials ! Indeed, a popular verse promised good fortune for those who tied the knot this month – ‘Married when June Roses Grow, O’er Land and sea you’ll go.’ These were the couples who had sensibly avoided marrying in the month of May (‘Marry in May and you’ll rue the day’). Such commonly-held superstitions meant that nineteenth-century vicars were often kept busy at the end of April and the beginning of June!

Among the Roses, Marion C Pearce. Via Wikimedia Commons

I hope you are enjoying the new season of the BBC’s Who Do you Think You Are? which started with a search on behalf of TV and Radio presenter Zoe Ball. There was much to learn here but chief for me was the way in which Zoe’s mother’s family (whom she had thought had always hailed from the North East) were traced back to Cornwall. Zoe’s 3x great grandfather, James Temby, was a miner (who also ran a greengrocer’s). By the time of his death, he had become a valued member of the Geordie Community in which he lived. But he had started life in Cornwall (including a stint as a toddler with his mother in Bodmin jail) and he’d also worked for a time in Guernsey. It always surprises me how far earlier generations travelled to find work. And Zoe’s family story also pleased me because it was a healthy reminder that none of us are as rooted in one place as we perhaps like to think we are !

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007t575

The latest featured article on my blog is The Problem with Perambulators https://ruthasymes.co.uk/2026/05/14/the-problem-with-perambulators/ We sometimes forget that items that we now take for granted in day-to-day life were once considered new-fangled. As with all inventions, the pram had its fair share of naysayers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thankfully for women, the pros were eventually deemed to outweigh the cons!

It’s surprising what strange avenues we can go down when looking at life for our families in the past. In other research this month, I’ve also been looking at refrigerators which were surprisingly very uncommon in British homes until after the Second World War! It seems that cool pantries and cold slabs sufficed in most homes even when electricity was well-established.

Book Corner

This month, I’ve read The Eights by Joanna Miller.

This is a fictional account of four young women in 1919-1920 (check), the first at Oxford to receive degrees. As well as being a compelling read – all four have fascinating back stories, the book is a superb evocation of life amongst the spires at an unsettled time just after the First World War when women (over 30) had just won the right to vote, Spanish influenza was wreaking havoc across the country, and young men and women faced baffling new ways of living and relating to each other. Many thanks to my American friend Tanya for recommending and indeed providing this book!

Hoping that you’re making the most of the warm weather, perhaps by visiting the places where your ancestors once lived, worked or holidayed.

Till next time !

Ruth

Family History Research Services.

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About Ruth A. Symes