Brushing Up on the Family Trade

As my great grandfather Robert Edwin Shorrocks, my great great grandfather Walter Shorrocks and my great, great, great grandfather James Shorrocks (bca 1794) were all members of a dynasty of craft Brush Manufacturers in Salford, Lancashire, I have developed an interest in their trade.

And in the possibility of actually seeing how the brushes were made by viewing the film made by Sam Hanna in 1968 of the operations of a small company (similar one assumes to that of my family) - Baldwin's of Burnley in this case, rather than Shorrocks' of Salford.

One day, I hope to get to see the film or even buy a copy - in the meantime, I'll just provide the background and the sequence notes.

BACKGROUND

Sam Hanna was a Burnley born amateur film maker whose collection of 587 reels of mostly 16mm film was acquired by the North West Film Archive at the Manchester Metropolitan University in November 2005.

Sam, who has been dubbed 'the Lowry of film making', had a lifelong passion for cinematography. Born in 1903, he became a teacher of handicrafts and, against strong opposition from the education authorities, pioneered the use of film in the classroom.

Self taught Hanna had a film-making spanning six decades, from the 1930s to the 1980s. He is perhaps best known for the Old Crafts Series which forms a unique record of such long-forgotten crafts as brush-making, coopering, clog-making, and charcoal burning.

Also of great interest are his films of local events and customs, notably colour footage of the 'Busby Babes' in 1957, records of children's street games from the 1950s and footage of training exercises performed by his local Home Guard battalion during World War Two.

In 2009/10, the legacy of Sam Hanna will be brought to life again through online access, exhibitions, screenings and workshops. This new project links the North West Film Archive with partners in Lancashire Museums, Libraries and Record Offices, Towneley Hall Museum, and the MMU History Department.

Film No. 5100
OLD ENGLISH CRAFTS; BALDWINS BRUSH MAKERS ESTABLISHED 1854
Producer: Sam Hanna
1968
colour , sound (sep), 12 min. 21 sec:

Depicts the dying craft of making yard and paint brushes by hand at Baldwin's Brush Makers, (established 1854) at Cog Lane, Burnley. It includes footage of a yard brush head being created by a stock knife, holes being bored using a treadle machine and bristles inserted skilfully using pitch and twine, before the brush is trimmed.

Also features the different process of applying bristles to a paintbrush, as they are strapped, levelled up, tacked and sealed to the handle. Other brush-making skills such as combing fibres, cutting bristles and wiring brushes are also shown.

SEQUENCES:

Shot of a man inserting bristles into a red hand brush. "Mr Baldwin is the last of a family that have made brushes for over a century in this workshop".

Cut to shot of second man doing the same job in the same location. The man is shown dipping the ends of bristles into tar-like substance (pitch), winding twine around the dipped area, re-dipping the ends and inserting the bristles into the brush.

Cut to shot of a worker operating a stock knife (that is associated with clog-making) to cut and shape the heads of hand-made yard brushes. The knife is held on the workbench by a hook on the knife and an eye that is fixed to the bench.

Cut to shot of a worker inspecting wooden cones that are topped with curved drill bits. "The holes to receive the bristles in the brush head are made by means of a spoon bit, fixed into a wooden cone, which screws onto the head of a treadle boring machine."

Close up shot of one of the drill bits on a cone. Spoon bits vary in size from small to large diameters depending on the bristles to be received. A treadle machine (operated by a pedal) is shown. The operator stands on one leg, operating machine with other foot, as holes are drilled into the brush head. The drilling process is shown and a yard brush head with the requisite number of drilled holes is shown to the camera.

Cut to whitewashed walls, the brush maker's workshop. A vat of boiling pitch (tar-like substance) is in the middle of the workspace, the brush maker works with the brush head and bristles next to him. He judges the correct clump of bristles, dips the ends in the pitch and wraps some twine (or "thrum") around the end of the bristles. The twine is pulled tight on a steel rod that is fixed to the bench. He dips the ends in the pitch once more before inserting the bristles into one of the holes in the brush head.

In a different location, the brush is then shown to be trimmed by hand-operated bench shears to ensure that the bristles are the same length.

Fibres are then shown being cut by guillotine. A length gauge is set so that bristles are cut to required length.

New close up shot from a different angle showing bristles being inserted into a yard brush.

Good view of the bench-fixed steel rod that has become worn down from twine being pulled tight against it.

Explanation of the different types of materials used to make bristles and which countries they come from.

The inspection of the brush head after shearing is the final operation, the worker is seen passing his hand over the bristles to check for irregularities.

Cut to shot of a 'comb' device that is fixed to a bench. This is used if a mixture of fibres is required, for example animal hair and bristle. The mixture is drawn through the teeth of the comb to produce "hackled" or "combed" bristle. This action cleans the materials before dividing or multiplying the rows of differing components, until uniformity is obtained. The device also helps to remove small or extraneous lengths of bristle as the sample is "dragged" through the comb by hand.

New shot showing bristles laid out on a bench, narrator explains that the bristle materials are naturally bent and the craftsman ensures that the bends lie in the same direction.

Cut to bristles being put onto a paintbrush. The bristles are spread out on the brush handle - a narrow thong of leather is nailed on to hold them in place.

From a different angle, the same process begins. Once the thong has been nailed down once, the bristles are levelled up with a knife. The centre of the brush is marked with a knife which helps to stagger the placing of tacks on both sides of the brush and avoid them meeting in the middle.

Cut to the finishing process, where the ends of the bristles are welded and sealed on to the brush handle using a hot iron powered by a gas-fired heater.

The final scene shows the skill of a female worker wiring bristles on to a brush head, to produce a brush that will be used to groom horses. The narrator claims the action had to be "filmed in slow motion" as the woman was working so quickly. Once the bristles are wired, the woman is shown trimming the brush with shears that are attached to her work bench.

In search of the the Old North - Yr Hen Ogledd

My map of ‘Keith Johnsons’ in the USA in my previous posting, nudged me into reporting on some of the interesting work on surname distributions that has been undertaken for England by Kevin Schürer.

The whole paper ‘Surnames and the search for regions’, Local Population Studies, 72 (2004) by K. Schürer can be found at:

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/surnames/papers/schurer.pdf

Kevin is the Director of both the UK Data Archive and Economic and Social Data Service and also Professor of History at the University of Essex.

His paper analyses the geographical distribution of surnames in England in 1881 in an attempt to identify ‘cultural provinces’ or local ‘countries’ (i.e. ‘pays’ in French), following the 19th Century search for districts ‘to which people felt that they belonged’.

That is distinct areas ‘which could evoke sentimental feelings amongst those who had moved away – and which people felt were inhabited by their relations, friends and fellow workers, having a character all of their own’ (see my post on the French human geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache).

While 396,776 unique surnames were recorded in the 1881 Census of England and Wales, there were only 41,203 surnames with a frequency of 25 individuals or more. Schürer uses these surnames as the basis of his study. This equates to an average of one additional surname for every 630 persons across the whole population.

The distribution of surnames was, as is still typical, very skewed. One fifth of the population shared just under 60 surnames; a half of the population were accounted for by some 600 surnames; while the top 10,000 surnames covered 90 per cent of the population.

Conversely, ten per cent of the population, those with the rarest surnames, jointly accounted for some 30,000 surnames, more if those with frequencies of less than 25 are also considered.

So what does the data covering some 26 million people with some 41,000 different surnames reveal about regional diversity?

I have taken the Northern England as my area of interest – drawing on the comments made in Schürer’s paper.

Looking first at the density (i.e. the average number of persons per surname), not surprisingly Wales stands out as having a low surname density (or a high number of people per surname) - but one which is matched in an area consisting of south Lancashire and the south-western parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire.

The low density of surnames in south Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire seems to be associated with a greater propensity towards toponymic (place descriptive) originating surnames (e.g. Grimshaw, Greenhalgh, Ramsbottom, Sykes, Scargill) at the expense of the ‘son’ ending patronymics which are elsewhere typically northern. The latter dilute the toponymics to a greater degree in the areas of Norse (Cumbria) and Danish (east Yorkshire and Lincolnshire) settlement.

Across England, the patronymic and metronymic surnames (those ending in –son, for example, Johnson, Richardson, Jackson, Mallinson) are relatively frequent in proportional terms north and east of the line drawn from Chester to London (i.e. the old Danelaw), excluding Rutland and East Anglia.

It is interesting to note that this nineteenth-century distribution of patronymic and metronymic surnames is very similar to that depicted by the Lay Subsidy Rolls some 500 to 600 years earlier. The processes of industrialisation and migration, even over half a millennium apparently did had fundamentally change the pattern.

An alternative line of analysis is to consider the degree of clustering of surnames (or the extent to which the surnames in a particular place do or do not overlap or correspond with those of another place).

Centring the analysis on Lancaster, there is a high degree of correspondence with adjoining areas. But correspondence is also high with parishes extending through the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and also parts of north Wales.

Conversely, the degree of correspondence is relatively weak with much of the southern part of the county and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

It would appear that there are echoes here of the regional pattern displayed in toponymic surnames.

Refocusing the central point on the city of York, the parishes with the highest degree of surname correspondence are located in the North and East Ridings of the county, but relatively high levels of correspondence are also displayed by parishes in Cumberland, and to a lesser degree Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire.

Equally, most parishes in the west of the country (except Cumbria) record relatively low levels of surname correspondence with York. It may not suit Yorkshire loyalists to learn that the North and East Ridings of ‘God’s own county’ have more in common, using this measure, with north Lancashire and Cumberland than they do with the West Riding - which, in turn, seems bound at the hip with south Lancashire.

Looking more specifically at the degree to which individuals with the same surname were scattered by distance, amongst those regions with the lowest separation distances (with the darkest shading in the map) were south Lancashire and the southern parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire – which again stand out as a common area.

A second belt of low separation distances takes in Cheshire, north Staffordshire and north-east Derbyshire, while a ‘middling belt’ encompasses Shropshire, south Staffordshire, south Derbyshire, stretching over to east Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire, with Lincolnshire being joined by Cambridgeshire.

So what does this tell us about the North, as a region, and its distinct cultural districts or 'pays'?

Well, nothing for certain that's for sure - but it is fascinating that the surname evidence supports the common observation that the South Lancashire and West Yorkshire dialects are very close, in spite of their separation by the bleak Pennine hills.

So, could there be a faint outline still sketched on the palimpsest of the ancient Celtic / Brigantian kingdoms of Yr Hen Ogledd (the old 'Welsh North')?

This would certainly fit with the historical references to the relatively longstanding survival of a Celtic kingdom in West Yorkshire (Elmet - and its likely capital 'Leeds') and the presence of a cluster of 'Welsh' placenames in South Lancashire (including 'Wigan').

228 people with the name Keith Johnson in Minnesota

I was surprised to find that you can map any current combination of forename and surname in the USA through the White Pages website:

http://names.whitepages.com/Minnesota

You may wish to try it for your own name. Apparently there are 228 people with the name Keith Johnson in Minnesota - and the name most commonly occurs in California (2,193) and Texas (1,621).

Seems that I gained some anonymity when my grandfather changed the family name from Shorrocks to Johnson. I can't find a single Keith Shorrocks!

Plus ça change - 'Genre de Vie'

Paul Vidal de la Blache, 1845 - 1918

Paul Vidal de la Blache was a 19th Century French human geographer, who melded his interests in archaeology, history and geography.

He was the dominant figure in Human Geography in France at the turn of the twentieth century, and was still widely quoted when I read Geography at Cambridge 1962-65.

He suggested that a deep but mutual relationship could develop over time between the natural environment and man's activities. In that sense, Vidal would have had some sympathy with the concept of solastalgia. But he was also emphatic that our responses to the environment were optional and dynamic.

His views were shaped largely by dissatisfaction with the environmental Determinism that dominated nineteenth-century geography, particularly as argued by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel.

For Ratzel, for example, the 'mediteranean' climates of southern Europe, California, Chile, the Cape and southern Australia would impose shared responses to land-use - and that in turn would shape culture. Well - he was right about one thing - they all produce good wine.

In contrast, Vidal de la Blache proposed the doctrine of Possibilism, which holds that a set of environmental conditions can give rise to different cultural responses.

This, he argued, necessitated much closer attention to history and a narrower focus on 'places' than was usual in the human geography of the day, which often drew its comparisons across countries and major regions.

He conceived the concept of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape.

This led to studies of natural regions and their matching rural cultures, as distinct 'pays' from which, I was once kindly reminded by a French friend in Manila, one can all too easily become 'depaysané'.

La Blache received his doctorate in 1872 and began working at the Nancy-Université. Vidal de la Blache returned to the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1877 as a full Professor of Geography and taught there the next twenty-one years. He transferred to the Université de Paris, where he continued teaching until he retired in 1909 at the age of sixty-four.

Vidal de la Blache's interests strongly marked the next generation of French geographers, who not only inherited many of the theoretical and methodological preoccupations of his work but also finished projects that he had sketched or left incomplete at his death.

Vidal de la Blache's major works include Etats et nations de l'Europe ( 1889 ), Tableau de la géographie de la France ( 1903 ), and La France de l'est ( 1917 ).

Hearts Ease and Solastalgia

TANGATA WHENUA - THE LAND WHERE THE AFTERBIRTHS ARE BURIED

As I mentioned in my previous posting, the issue of motive in the pursuit of Family History raises another issue which touches on my commitment as an immigrant to New Zealand.

The relevant Wikipedia entry notes that the question of social identity lies at the core of identifying as Maori - the original and founding inhabitants.

While ‘European’ New Zealanders often mock the appearance of blond, blue-eyed children in Maori ceremonies and dance troupes (and the receipt of government compensation by like-complexioned adults) Maori are adamant that it is not the way you look that determines your affinity – it is your genealogy or ‘whakapapa’.

It follows that:

‘Family history needs little justification in such communitarian societies, where one's identity is defined as much by one's kin network as by individual achievement, and the question "Who are you?" would be answered by a description of father, mother, and tribe.

The recitation of whakapapa is a critical element in establishing identity - and the phrase 'Ko [enter name] au' (I am [enter name]') is in fact the personal statement that incorporates (by implication) over 25 generations of heritage.

Experts in whakapapa are able to trace and recite a lineage not only through the many generations in a linear sense, but also between such generations in a lateral sense.

Many physiological terms are also genealogical in 'nature'. For example the terms 'iwi', 'hapu', and 'whanau' (as noted above) can also be translated in order as 'bones', 'pregnant', and 'give birth'.

The prize winning Māori author, Keri Hulme, named her best known novel as The Bone People: a title linked directly to the dual meaning of the word 'iwi as both 'bone' and '[tribal] people'.

Most formal orations (or whaikorero) begin with the "nasal" expression - Tihei Mauriora! This is translated as the 'Sneeze of Life'. In effect, the orator (whose 'sneeze' reminds us of a newborn clearing his or her airways to take the first breath of life) is announcing that 'his' speech has now begun, and that his 'airways' are clear enough to give a suitable oration.

Hence, whakapapa also implies a deep connection to land and the roots of one’s ancestry. In order to trace one’s whakapapa, it is essential to identify the location where one’s ancestral heritage began, until "you can’t trace it back any further."

In this way "Whakapapa links all people back to the land and sea and sky and outer universe, therefore, the obligations of whanaungatanga extend to the physical world and all being in it."

Correspondingly, the Maori words for the lands of the people of this locality, ‘tangata whenua’, celebrate the fact that the afterbirth or placentas (whenua) of the children of the tribe are buried there – that is there is a complete identity between land and people.

IS THEIR AN ECOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS?

This raises the issue of what we can learn from Maori in respect of the seamlessness and continuity of people and landscape – an issue that bears on an emerging preoccupation with ‘solastalgia’.

Drawing on Daniel B. Smith’s article in the New York Times of January 27, 2010:

The term solastagia was coined nearly a decade ago by Canadian psychologist Glenn Albrecht who notes that “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.”

Australian aborigines, Navajos, Maori and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land.

And let us pause here to recognise the terrible challenges and dreadful losses that were experienced by indigenous people to the inroads of western colonisation. It is clear that, in accepting money for ‘land purchases’ the Maori chiefs had no concept of its subsequent alienation to individuals, or of the inexorable stream of immigrants that would follow, armed with more advanced technology and access to capital.

But Albrecht claims that “place pathology isn’t limited to native peoples. He has worked with the rural ‘settler’ communities of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Australia, who have reacted to widespread open cast coal mining and the destruction of a distinctive landscape by becoming anxious, unsettled, despairing, and depressed - just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them – they were suffering collectively from solastalgia.

In contrast, the communities of the Cape Region of South Western Australia have been judged to be in a state of idyllic ‘solastaphilia’ by Albrecht – at one both with their environment and themselves.

However, solastalgia in Albrecht’s estimation, is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment. As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffering in return?

The basic question asked is ‘even if we can establish that as we move further into an urban, technological future, we move further away from the elemental forces that shaped our minds, how do we get back in touch with them?’

As Smith notes:

‘That question preoccupied Gregory Bateson, a major influence on eco¬-psychologists and something of a lost giant of 20th-century intellectual history who published a thought-provoking book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” in 1972.

It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. This “epistemological fallacy” led us to believe, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other.

Bateson went on to argue that nature was a recursive, mind-like system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.

So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We need to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.”

SANITY AND LANDSCAPE

But if I remember right, Bateson demonstrated very clearly from his work among different tribes in Papua New Guinea that there were extraordinarily wide variations in the cultures of different tribes in similar ecological settings.

He also postulated that the cultures, which ranged from compassionate and sane to brutal and indifferent, resulted from the influence of the personalities of dominant founding or leading individuals.

And some of the worst excesses of western societies were perpetrated during periods that we can only view in retrospect as eras of comparative social stability and ecological sustainability.

While the destruction of landscape and locality can drive people crazy, there are plenty of historical figures from unspoilt environments who were quite crazy enough to begin with (Genghis Khan is a case in point).

So it worries me that solastalgia may provide an excuse for selfishness and bigotry. And that it may be used to mask inherent conservatism that could in turn foster exclusivity and paranoia – a kind of global ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ movement which could easily lead on to an intolerance of outsiders.

And it is all too possible that the strengths of the Maori link between land and people – which have been so vital in preserving their identity – can also entrench cultural divisions and political separation – and hold back innovation and adaptation within Maori society itself.

As for me, I will always be a Cheshire Lad at heart – as they say ‘you can take the boy out of the country, you can’t take the country out of the boy’.

But I also feel affinities with a number of different landscapes, from the sugarcane fields of Cavite to the dusty plains of Outback Australia and the barren hills of central Otago. And maybe I have to become a bit more committed to safeguarding the sanity of my special 'pays'.

But perhaps there is room for a footnote: Nostalgia and Solastalgia are strange twin children.

The Cheshire of my boyhood no longer exists - except as a landscape lost to all but memory.

As Housman has it for the neighbouring county of Shropshire:

'That is the land of lost content'
I see it shining plain.
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again'.

The Past then is another Country that has its own place pathology.

The Culture of Family History

THE QUESTION OF MOTIVE

For those of us who are engaged in family history, the question of motive cannot be ignored. To the wives, relatives and friends of many of us, our interests are a closed book.

My wife, for example, immediately half-stifles a quiet, cosmetic yawn when the topic is raised and hurriedly finds some pressing household task that needs attending, or flies to the closet to check her wardrobe, clothes matches, and fashion accessories.

And even those of us who are consumed with tracing particular lines and scaling apparent ‘brick walls’ can be remarkably casual about the concerns of other family historians.

My only foray to a family history society meeting here in New Zealand confirmed my suspicion that most people attend because the meetings offer a captive audience – but one that soon develops glazed eyes too. There is ‘nothing it seems that is more interesting than one’s own family – and nothing less interesting than someone else’s’.

And yet, for all that, I am prepared to contend that it is a noble endeavour - as long as it stresses commonality, the lessons of everyday life, and our shared humanity.

In my own case, the most obvious wellsprings are clearly the loss of my father prior to my birth (and with it the family stories belonging to his forbears); the desirability of providing some kind of account of their ancestors for my young sons and their offspring down the line (as an ageing father); the reinforcement of the importance of some kind of family continuity given my migration from the United Kingdom to New Zealand; and the yearning to attest in some way to the lives of loved ones who had died.

The Wikipedia entry on Family History introduces some interesting points touching on the wider value of family history research; including the importance of ancestor veneration in some religions, the link to nation-building on the achievements of pioneers, and the desirability of stressing the importance of continuous immigration and population flux as a background to the increasing diversity of western societies.

SPECIAL STRANDS

In my case, there are a number of other strands as well. One source, which may surprise some, given my UK background, was Alex Haley’s 1976 historical novel ‘Roots: The Saga of an American Family’.

This was based on rough and ready research about Haley’s family history, starting with the story of a male ancestor Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped in The Gambia in 1767 and transported to the Province of Maryland to be sold as a slave. Haley claimed to be a ‘seventh-shirri’ descendant of Kunta Kinte. Haley's work on the novel ostensibly involved ten years of research, intercontinental travel and writing.

‘Roots’ was eventually published in 37 languages, and Haley won a Special Award for the work in 1977 from the Pulitzer Board and was also adapted into a popular television mini-series that year. The serial reached a record-breaking 130 million viewers.

When I went to The Gambia on a consulting assignment in 1980, I brought back an African drum for my infant son Matthew, drawing on Haley’s story.

The second unusual link is the concern with lineage in Buddhism.

A lineage in Buddhism is a record of teachers and their disciples, or students. Zen Buddhists maintain records of their historical teachers who, according to the traditional history of that school, have passed the Dharma, or Buddhist teachings, from generation to generation in an unbroken line since the time of the Buddha.

This vertical line is a lineage of spiritual ancestors, in Zen also called patriarchs, who have run the gauntlet of testing and ‘transmission’, provides validation of the purity of the teachings that have been handed down.

Apparently 27 ‘generations’ link Buddha to Bodhidharma, a red-haired ascetic who ‘came from the west’ (probably from modern Afghanistan) bringing the teachings or Dharma to China in the 5th century.

As Chan or Zen subsequently flourished in China there were many branches in the lineage, some of which later died out and some of which continue unbroken to the present day.

Some of these lines were transmitted to Japan, establishing the Zen tradition. Perhaps the most famous of these transmissions to Japan was that of Dogen who travelled to China for Chan training in the 13th century, and after receiving Dharma transmission in the Caodong line he returned to Japan and established the Soto line. The Linji line was also transmitted to Japan where it became known as the Rinzai line.

A third influence has been rubbing up against Maori culture here in New Zealand – and I have more to say about that in the next post.

And I suppose, I have always been interested in and involved with research challenges. So the increasing availability of online birth, marriages and deaths records fuelled my curiosity. This in turn was enhanced by the advent of genetic testing, the publication of books like Stephen Oppenheimer’s ‘The Origins of the British’ and Bryan Sykes’ Blood of the Isles, the opening up of community sites like GenesReunited, and the attention more recently focused on the topic by TV programmes like ‘Who do you think you are?’

GETTING PERSONAL

For me though ultimately, it is mostly about the story and the linkages that they demonstrate between us all. As I pledged to my own family when I wrote my Family History, ‘no family members were harmed in the preparation of the text’.

More than that, I hope that the stories provide in some cases a kind of memorial to those who have gone before. And that they provide a real and, in a sense, living link to deceased family members.

In this, I can’t help but feel some resonance of the sentiments reported recently in the newspaper of Jaqueline Milledge, the NSW Deputy State Coroner. Commenting on the evidence given at an inquest about the death of a troubled young man by a friend, she said:

‘We now know him as very much a complex, three-dimensional character. You have served your friend very well indeed. I can tell you that he would be very proud of you - and I’ve got a very strong faith and do believe that people do know what’s going on once they leave us’.

Out of Africa

DNA TEST REVEALS THE ORIGINS OF THE SPECIES 'DARWIN'
By Kathy Marks in Sydney from the UK Independent, Friday 5th February 2010

Charles Darwin's ancient ancestors were among the first group of Homo sapiens to leave Africa, a DNA analysis has revealed.

His forebears, Cro-Magnon men, left Africa about 45,000 years ago, heading to the Middle East and Central Asia, then migrated to Europe about 10,000 years later. There, they clashed with the Neanderthals, driving them to extinction. During the last Ice Age they retreated to Spain before moving north again about 12,000 years ago.

Darwin's ancient family history was revealed by DNA tests on his great-great-grandson, Chris, who lives in the Blue Mountains, just west of Sydney.

Chris Darwin's Y chromosome was analysed as part of the Genographic Project, which is tracking the migratory history of humans. It shows he belongs to a male lineage called Haplogroup R1b.

Mr Darwin, 48, who emigrated to Australia in 1986, said yesterday that he had been intrigued to discover that his ancestors had been in one of the first groups of H. sapiens to leave Africa.

"I have always clung to the hope that I had inherited Charles Darwin's adventurous ability, his wish to go over the hill and see what's on the other side. From what I hear of my background, it sounds like we like looking over the tops of hills."

Mr Darwin has already demonstrated his intrepid spirit, windsurfing around Britain and hosting the "World's Highest Dinner Party" at 2,200 feet, on the summit of Peru's highest mountain, Huascaran – an event marred only by the red wine freezing and two guests suffering hypothermia.

The Genographic Project, a joint initiative of National Geographic magazine and IBM, has analysed more than 350,000 DNA samples.