One of my father’s great quests is to find the grave of his 2 x great grandfather, Thomas Gaffney. The family story is that Thomas’s son Michael travelled from New Zealand back to England to place a headstone on his father’s grave. While I was living in England, I was determined to find that headstone.
Category: England (Page 1 of 3)

My 3 x great grandfather George Tunnecliffe (or Tunnecliff/Tunnicliff/Tunnicliffe) arrived in New Zealand aboard the Dinapore, landing in Auckland on 5th of August 1857. Three days later he married a fellow passenger, Elizabeth Barber, and they made their home in the province of Taranaki.
It’s been over a month since we arrived back from a family trip to the UK, where I managed to squeeze in a few genealogy-related activities.
I’ve done my fair share of walking around graveyards in the vain hope of discovering an ancestor’s (legible) gravestone. And occasionally I get lucky! (See an earlier post about finding George & Elizabeth Kemp in West Yorkshire.) Sometimes I’ve even checked the burial registers or with cemetery staff beforehand and know for certain that a…
My 3 x great grandfather George was baptised in this church on 19 December 1831, the son of William Tunnicliffe, farmer of Hall Green, and Louisa his wife1. St Mary & All Saints Church (Checkley, Staffordshire, England), Staffordshire Baptisms 1538-1900; digital image, FindMyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk : accessed 01 Aug 2014).
Wordless Wednesday is an ongoing series at GeneaBloggers.
Some weeks back I posted a photo I took of St Mary’s church in Polstead, Suffolk. It’s a beautiful old village church, and when we visited back in August, we could just walk in and take a look around. Inside, I picked up a copy of Polstead Church and Parish1 for a small donation, and…
Wordless Wednesday is an ongoing series at GeneaBloggers.
Wordless Wednesday is an ongoing series at GeneaBloggers.
I posted a photo last week of Rothwell’s market cross – a replica of the medieval one, which originally was close to the current site. I have several census returns where the address is simply “Near Crop” or “New Cross”, or maybe they are the same? In the following instances, they look quite distinct: In…