How did your family end up in Liverpool?
I've been involved in a couple of articles recently about just that, and it got me thinking.
Apparently the Liverpool family history society has been bombarded with requests for help since the culture co launched a competition to find the oldest family in the city.
The winners, who can prove the earliest Liverpool ancestor, will get to ride in a horse-drawn coach during the 800th birthday pageant in August, as well as a host of other goodies.
You have to have written proof though, in the form of a parish register entry or similar and get your ancestral line sorted out by the end of July.
The second, more all encompassing idea, comes from To Cut to the Chase Productions who are putting on a major Wall Talks promenade performance in the Tobacco Warehouse and want people's tales of how their ancestors ended up in Liverpool and what they did when they got here.
I dug out some old photos last weekend thinking I may have a go at that one.
My mum's side of the family flirted with the city over a number of years.
All her grandparents (my great-grandparents) are buried in Bootle Cemetery, and my great-great-grandparents also chose Liverpool as their resting place after a lot of wandering all over the British Isles.
My great-great-grandfather John Scantlebury was a customs officer born in Plymouth but who plied his trade in Devon and Northern Ireland (apparently he had the choice of Belfast or Liverpool but his wife thought there'd be less temptation of the liquor variety over the water!).
But he ended hid days in Grove Street up by Gladstone Docks.
His son William was a waterman in Liverpool in the 1890s, but most of the family ended up here after the First World War, descending from both Northern Ireland and from Hull - with a bit of Manx and Lancashire/Cheshire millworker thrown in for good measure.
My grandparents, keen singers in local choirs, married at the now-vanished Bankhall Mission and then had the temerity to move to Manchester, although my grandmother returned to make sure at least my aunt if not my mother was born within sight of the Liver Birds.
The last stragglers moved out in the 1960s, but I suppose I have proved there must be something in the air drawing us back.
Of course, this potted family history is only really of interest to myself and a few members of the Scantlebury/Boden/Walmsley side of my family who populated this city for a while.
But I suppose it sums up how a lot of people found themselves here, and is an example of the itinerant, mongrel (in a good way!) background of so many Liverpool families.
So I am going to continue digging out the photos and the stories.
Anyone else who wants to get involved in the Wall Talks legacy project should email their family history to info@walltalks.com
