2025
Arlene Mordish
Arlene already knew quite a lot about her ancestors who came to London in the early years of C20th from villages and towns in what is now Ukraine and Poland. There were several professional musicians in the family while both her grandfathers were tailors. In the end, all I had to do was organise her information and present it as a family tree with accompanying research notes.
2024
Frank Newhofer/Neuhofer
Frank knew little about his family background but he did have a stash of papers which had survived the family’s escape to England from Nazi Germany. The documents were in German, mostly in ‘Gothic’ script and hard to read. A story of people caught up in dislocation and war and, for some, refuge.
Phil Murray
Phil’s paternal ancestors were among the first Jewish settlers in Ipswich whose names and descendants are known to us today. They arrived here sometime in C17th and settled for some years in Fore Street, down by the docks. Phil’s 3x grandfather, Israel Isaacs, left Ipswich in 1795 with most of his family after a very public row with one of senior members of Ipswich Synagogue. From then, the family story moves to London and Portsea in Hampshire.
Peter Winbourne
Peter’s ancestors all came to the East End of London from Belarus, Poland and Ukraine. They arrived here around the turn of the C20th. His grandmother and her sister played in the orchestra pit at the Palaseum in Commercial Road which had opened in 1912 as a Yiddish Theatre.
Monique Chamings
I explored Monique’s English side of the family and found the Barfoots, river boatmen working out of Osney in Oxford at the turn of the C19th. Her great great grandfather, Samuel (1848 – 1914), was honoured by the Royal Humane Society for rescuing a young boy from drowing in Osney Lock.
Jade Webster and Fabian Idziniak
As Fabian is our daughter in law’s brother, his family tree was already done and dusted. Jade is a Londoner, and her family is mostly from what is now Waltham Forest.
2023
Moya Perrett
Moya’s family history is typical of people from Goole, the inland port on the Humber. They were Irish migrants coming to work in the north Lincolnshire fields, seafarers and local river-boat workers. All this, plus her Dad’s cousin, Laureen Sylvestre, who was a cabaret artist at the Shim-Sham Club, centre of Black and Queer culture in Soho in the 1930s.
2020
John Jones
Family history of John Jones whose family, at the turn of C20th, was from north east Wales and Birmingham. His Brummie great-grandfather was said to be a Peaky Blinder.
Beverley Levy
Family history of Beverley Levy whose family came to the East End of London at the end of the C19th from Poland and other parts of the Russian Empire.
Nina Grunberg
Nina’s family comes from Orkney, Shetland, mainland Scotland, Ulster and Poland – a mix of fishermen and herring lasses from the shores of the very north of Britain, along with her grandfather’s Polish/German heritage which gets lost in the chaos of Nazi occupation.
2019
Mary Phibbs (nee Gillingham)
Family history of Mary Phibbs (nee Gillingham) a Guernsey heritage, and a mystery solved
Fieldwork 