The evening started with the Branch AGM followed by the talk My Deal boatmen database.
David Walsh started his database in 2020 during the long period of lockdown at the start of the pandemic of Covid-19 and used family trees of anyone who had links to working with boats in Deal and nearby coastal towns. Unfortunately, David’s computer was unable to link to our projector so he gave his talk valiantly without illustrations.
David’s database started with Deal but was complicated by the fact that Deal was a small town with limited surnames; he had also looked at families in Ramsgate, Dover and Folkestone. In his own family tree, three of his grandparents were of Irish decent and his remaining grandmother came from a large family in Dover, which gave him the link to the Kent coast. The database related to the complex environment around Deal and the Goodwin Sands involving shipwrecks, Deal luggers, boatmen, lifeboat men and some Deal pilots. He also looked at the farming heritage of surrounding villages which declined in the late 1800s with many people moving to London, other parts of Kent, and further afield to Commonwealth countries and the USA. Australia drew people with the gold rushes of 1850s onwards and large numbers of immigrants moved to New Zealand with assisted passages, as military personnel or later to join in with NZ’s gold rush. The populations of towns such as Chatham and Portsmouth increased because of their links with the Royal Navy.
The database has been colour-coded to show links between particular towns and their populations e.g. families from Deal and Walmer are colour-coded in yellow while boatmen have a special status and are colour-coded in dark blue. Anyone leaving England to go abroad is shown in orange but as we couldn’t see the illustrations we had to imagine David’s scheme for visualising families’ links to local towns and further away. The talk also covered disparate famous visitors to Deal including Daniel Defoe, Lord Nelson, L.S. Lowry and Henry VIII, cross-channel swimming and Deal’s relationship with the Slave Trade and local families that were involved in it. Other points of interest were a Deal sailor on board HMS Victory at Trafalgar, who survived, and another aboard HMS Erebus on the Franklin expedition to find the North-West Passage, where all souls were lost. Overall David’s database has 9,500 people who have some link to Deal and many more people still to be catalogued, which will be a mammoth task. He finished a fascinating talk with recommending visits to Deal library, Deal Maritime Museum and a book list:-
The Crossing – Kathy Watson
Heroes of the Goodwin Sands – Rev. Thomas S Treanor
Erebus – Michael Palin
The Forgotten Trade – Nigel Tattersfield and John Fowles
Report by Lesley Smith - Secretary Deal Branch of Kent FHS