This tatty looking brown wooden box is a Thompson family heirloom passed from my Grandfather to my father and onto me. What makes this special is the story that goes with it and it goes something like this:

Like most men his age my Grandfather, Ernest Thompson, served during the second world war and at it’s end was “demobed” returning to England. As part of this return to civilian life each serviceman was presented with a number of items including a suitcase to carry their belongings. This simple brown box is that suitcase.

When my father began his career working at the Westlands factory in Yeovil as an apprentice tool maker he needed some means to carry around his tools as he went from place to place. Resourceful as ever, my grandfather engaged a local carpenter to convert said suitcase into something suitable. You can see the result in the picture below.

The top half of the case has been split and can be removed to reveal a number of differing sized draws and a large open area at the bottom. It’s a beautiful piece of work and, considering it’s age and the use it has had over the years, in pretty good shape.

So there you have it an unusual family heirloom but there is one slight problem with this story and that is that I can find no evidence that wooden suitcases were issued to demobed servicemen, only cardboard. It maybe that some regiments were issued wooded boxes and others cardboard. It may also be that Ernest went down to the local Woolworths and bought it. Either way it doesn’t matter to me, it’s still a great reminder and a testimony to the craftsmanship of days gone by.

The suitcase/tool box now sits in my garage holding my tools, not that they see much light of day as I may have inherited the case but not the skills so evident in my father and grandfather.

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As already stated elsewhere I am getting back into doing my family history fuelled by my wifes new years resolution. Even better I have now found a way of combining the search for my ancestors with my love for my mp3 player! Strange though it may seem but my iRiver iHp-140 is just the thing for capturing the past.

One of the first things that any family historian will tell you is that the best place to start your research is by speaking with your relatives who are still alive. They will have stories and information on your relatives that no trip to the public records office is ever going to tell you.

So how do you record these conversations? Well in the past you would use a trusty tape recorder or perhaps a dictiphone but now there is another way. The iRiver has a built in microphone and the capability of recording huge quantities of high quality sound. On the model I have (iHP-140) there is a 40gb hard drive - more than enough for my entire CD collection and still have plenty of room to record my family.

The recordings themselves can either be recorded as WAV or a MP3 files. The latter also offering the option of changing the bit rate too. These files can then be transferred to a desktop machine where they can be archived to CD or DVD-ROM for safe keeping. They could also be converted to a streaming format, such as realmedia, and made available on a website.

THe iHP-140 also allows an external microphone to be connected and a clip on mic is included as part of the package. The one final neat feature of the iRiver is the ability to plug in external hardware, such as CD players or, perhaps, a dictaphone allowing these sources to be recorded to a more suitable format. This allows me to make recordings on my Olympus dictaphone and then transfer these recordings to MP3 format via the iHP-140.

I think that this is a great way of capturing your family’s history forever.

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So it’s that time of the year again when you make your resolutions that last the first week of the new year and then never get spoken of again…

Now I’m not suggesting that my wife’s resolution is going to be short lived but it has had a profound effect on me. Helen has this year decided to research her family history, which is great as this is something I have been doing for sometime (www.thompsonhistory.co.uk) and it will be good to do together.

So Helen has spent the last two nights searching on the various on-line resources for details of her family with some success. Most of the work has been done via www.ancestry.com and concentrating on the census returns. This gives you so much information: a single line can reveal age, birth place and occupation, while the surrounding lines will detail other family members.

When Helen was done I took the opportunity to look for some of my ancestors and, in particular, Ernest William Thompson, my great-grand father. He has always held some fascination for me as he was a Barnardos boy yet clearly had parents who were alive well into his thirties.

Given that Thompson is such a common name it is always difficult to get information without having to wade through thousands of records. Fortunately Ernest’s mother was called Alexina Maria Clarke, not a common name. So searching for Alexina I was able to find details for her in the 1871, 1881 and the 1901 census returns.

In 1871 Alexina and her husband Charles Thompson were living in Paddington, London and it was here, a few months after the census took place, that Ernest was born.

Once again I was able to find Alexina in the 1881 census but this time she and her family were living in North Luffenham, Rutland but missing from her list of children was Ernest who would have been ten at the time.

Both Alexina and Ernest appear on the 1901 census returns. Ernest now 30 and married and living in London. Alexina has moved back to Middlesex but has lost her husband on the way.

There are several questions that arise from this information:

• What made Alexina and her family move around the country? Was this due to Charles’ job or were there other reason?
• Why was Ernest William not living with his family when he was ten?

There is a 16 year gap in Ernest William’s life between his birth and when he turned up at Barnardos. It is possible that he was living with other relatives at the time of the census, he could have been living rough Artful Dodger style. It is also possible that we will never know – but I am going to continue to look.

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