During the lockdown I started to research my family tree. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve learnt a lot.
I’ve found that reading about family history can be pretty dry no matter how thrilling the underlying story. For me the exciting part of family history is when I make a discovery or uncover something unexpected. While I want to use this website as an opportunity to document what I’ve found out about my family I also want to convey the process I went through and some of the excitement I felt when I found out something new.
My family tree is online at Ancestry and I can be contacted at .
Why this website?
Henry James Humphrey Swendell (1830 - 1896) is my great, great grandfather and the person who most got me into genealogy. A lot of that is to do with him being a soldier which means there are lots of records to discover. There’s also a lot of details that are tantalisingly out of reach such as how he met his wife, Ann Saxon, and who was she? And I know he’s in a group photo, but I don’t know who he is.
Henry became immediately interesting very early on in my journey into family history. Having very quickly put together my family tree I decided that I had probably made lots of mistakes. An obvious set soon jumped out at me as three of Henry’s children were recorded as having been born in Canada. This was clearly wrong - working class people didn’t go abroad for a bit and then return to the UK in the 19th century. After checking census records it became clear that this is exactly what Henry had done. Why had he gone and why had he come back? This lead me to the history of the Rifle Brigade written in the 1890s which describes some of Henry’s time in Canada, local history societies in Canada and Henry’s service record.
Henry has inspired me to investigate the Crimean War which I knew nothing about and the British army’s time in Canada which I’d never heard of. Two trips to the National Archives to review the Rifle Brigade’s muster books have revealed why Henry wasn’t shot for desertion in the Crimean war and the fate of his brother.
There are still things about Henry that I don’t understand. His father, William Sewell Swendell (1781 - 1844), was a solicitor’s clerk who wrote letters to the King to ask for two of his other sons to be spared from being sent to Australia as convicts. How did Henry end up in the army when his father, for the time, seems to have been a very well educated man?
Henry appears to have thought well of the army as all his sons joined up. This opens up another set of army records to review and amongst others links to Gallipoli and India. I have pictures of his son, my great granddad, Thomas Swendell (1870 - 1949), with my mum as a baby, that’s them in the picture. Again this makes Henry tantalisingly close, but just beyond reach.
In many ways Henry is the reason for this website. I want to document all that I’ve found so that I don’t forget but also in a way that others can easily read it.