Book Cover Vol 1 Thanet to Tasmania
LucyAnn gave us a fascinating, illustrated talk about the history of the Curling family and her adventures whilst delving into it. Brought up in Ireland until the age of 12, she started from a baseline of very little knowledge, only that Charles James Napier was an important figure in her family’s story. In her early twenties, her father showed her a gold-tooled, leather bound manuscript book, which she christened the ‘Mildenhall Document’; this book was a record of all the contributors to a leaving present for her great-great grandfather Edward Curling. Edward was a land agent and was moving from Suffolk to take up a similar position for the Earl of Devon in County Limerick – wouldn’t we all love a document like that! At the end of the book, someone had started to record the birth dates and places of Edward and his immediate family and not until LucyAnn was in her late 30s did she start to investigate this further.
Great-great grandfather Edward Curling was reputedly born in St Nicholas-at-Wade in 1807 so LucyAnn and her husband took a mini-break to Thanet to find his baptism record in the church. Her naive enthusiasm was met with the vicar Owen Williams explanation that the church records were now kept in Canterbury Cathedral Archives but he kindly offered to track them down for her. LucyAnn was now infected with the ‘just one generation back’ bug. Six months later, a letter arrived from the vicar with a photocopy of Edward’s baptism recording his parents as Thomas Oakley Curling and his wife Jane of Shuart Farm, St. Nicholas-at-Wade. The middle name ‘Oakley’ made further research so much easier!
Later research involved investigating the predecessor of TNA Discovery to find the Will of Thomas Oakley Curling’s father Thomas Curling Snr. and also the Devon Record Office to look at the Earl of Devon’s Irish estates. Both of these were new resources for LucyAnn and the Devon records threw up the estate accounts for 1859 and 1869 with copious notes from Edward Curling. Thinking that the Suffolk Record Office might have similar accounts from Edward’s time at Mildenhall, the disappointment of finding nothing was tempered by the archivist finding 6 records on the British Library online database. These produced a vast amount of information including Edward’s journal while working in Kefalonia, the Napier Papers and the Liverpool Papers, which included many family letters, including one from Thomas Oakley Curling describing life as a settler in Van Diemen’s Land, later re-named Tasmania. One of LucyAnn’s female relatives had married General Sir Charles James Napier and his biographies, family letters and papers were a huge source of valuable information. Later, even more Napier Papers were tracked down in the Bodlian Library in Oxford.
LucyAnn talked about the twin branches of family history research which she called Time Tunnelling and Lateral Thinking. The former describes the bug which many people have of going back on their family tree, one generation after another. The lateral thinking idea is not so much about siblings but more about how to deal with’ brick walls’ and how to get round them; having the ability to be open-minded and willing to consider all the possibilities. It also gives you the chance to consider what our ancestors’ lives were really like at different periods in history and of making connections with other descendents researching the same families as you. LucyAnn is in the process of writing four books covering her family history research, the first of which has just been published, entitled ‘Thanet to Tasmania’.
Report by Lesley Smith
Secretary, Deal Branch of Kent FHS