The Time Traveller’s Handbook
Invitation to travel
through 2,000 years of British History
This is the
story of one large extended family and its footsteps through the history of
Britain, focused on its Yorkshire origins, over two millennia. What is extra
ordinary is that this is not an aristocratic family, but a family of ordinary
men and women , representative of those who provided the power banks which
drove the national story. It is a story of agriculturalists, soldiers,
mariners, and pioneers. It is a story of adventure, hard graft, passion,
poverty, sometimes of breaking the law, sometimes enforcing the law, sometimes
of inspiring achievement.
The reason
this story can be told is:
· The family has a surname, derived
from a small valley at the edge of the North York Moors, which has a uniqueness
which made it possible to extract our detailed story from the vast pool of
source material.
· That uniqueness has provided the
means to find multiple records of our family back to the thirteenth century.
· Our known rooting to a small valley
in Yorkshire, itself part of lands which formed a composite estate back to
Roman times, means that whilst we lose sight of individuals before the
thirteenth century, we can still explore the deep ancestral past of our ancestors
through Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavian to Roman times.
· We can then briefly consider the
primordial swamp, the bubbling cauldron of unknown folk, who continued their
footsteps yet further back through time, told through locations in the very
place where our known ancestors trod their paths.
This story
is the product of two generations of research, which started three quarters of
a century ago in the 1950s. It comprises a thoroughness of genealogical
analysis that means that we have a complete record of all members of the modern
family back to the start of parish records in the mid sixteenth century, and
their stories. It comprises an ambition of historical research and medieval
genealogy which has allowed an unusually accurate story to be told back to the
thirteenth century. It comprises the story of our known ancestral lands into
the deep historical past.
When Martin Farndale began
the research in the 1950s, he also collected stories, photographs, and family
artefacts, before they were lost to time, which has left us with the benefit of
an unparalleled richness of record to the Victorian period.
The Farndale
story Matrix page is the hub of our family story which will direct you on a
journey through time. The wider website also comprises the underlying research
and analysis. You can use hyperlinks in the story to explore more detail. The
wider website is also a genealogy, which binds together in separate family
groups which make up the whole family. Every member of the family, modern
and historical, has their
own webpage where the detailed story of every historical individual is told
in chronological detail. So if you
choose to explore the detail, you can explore the thousands of pages which make
the detailed research available. All the work behind the story is available on
the website.
Alternatively,
you can focus on the Farndale Story, reading the tales of the family’s main
adventures, dipping only into the detailed research, through hyperlinks, as the
mood takes you.
Who should use this
story to travel through time?
Family
The first
purpose of this website is to make available the genealogical research to all
who are descended from the Farndale family, whether or not they continue to
adopt the surname. For that purpose the
Farndale Story may provide the best starting place, but you can also return
to the home page of the website and explore your own
ancestry in detail, finding the
individual pages of each of your direct ancestors, and explore your own
unique story.
Those
interested in Yorkshire’s past
The family
story weaves a path through Yorkshire’s unique history, telling of its place in
the birth of Christianity, and
of a national identity. It tells of Lastingham
in 653 CE, at the mouth of Farndale, and it tells the story of the breathtaking
minster of Kirkdale. It tells of
the origins of the valley of Farndale
and of Rievaulx Abbey. The story
includes histories of Sheriff
Hutton, the home of the Nevilles and Richard III during the Wars of the
Roses and of medieval soldiers;
and of medieval Doncaster.
It explores the history of York in each of its
manifestations. It explores the Yorkshire roots of the Robin Hood stories. The story then
moves to Cleveland to tell Cleveland’s
history from the sixteenth century in detail through to the industrial
revolution, of mariners
of Whitby, the lost village of Kilton, ironstone mining, and of early industrial Leeds, Bradford,
Coatham, Hartlepool and Stockton. The story provides a new perspective on
Yorkshire’s history, by following one Yorkshire family’s path through time. The
family story provides a unique path, which tells Yorkshire’s story with novelty
and adhesion.
The latest
project, which is work in progress, is the North Yorkshire
Story.
Historians
The family
story also goes to the heart of the national story. It is a family’s eyewitness
account of the origins of the English nation, the Scandinavian influence on the
northern lands, and the period of Norman whitewash. The family footsteps
continue through the whims of aristocratic games of thrones, medieval
confrontation, and the founding of towns. The story, one of ordinary rural folk
is the dominant national story before the industrial revolution. The story then
follows the course of those folk as they encountered fundamental change. It
follows adventures at sea, and pioneers to the new lands which defined the
national spirit of a new empire Britain. It emerges into the twentieth century,
to face the trenches of the First World War and the total war of the Second.
The story provides rich analysis, supported by links to the detailed underlying
research. The story provides a distinctive source for a unique perspective on
the national story.
Genealogists
The Farndale
Family Website, from which the Farndale Story derives, provides a novel approach
to genealogy which has built on the important but more mechanical processes of
sifting records of births, deaths and marriages, and census records, to build
stories onto the genealogical framework. It has used two generations of family
research experience to explore new approaches to provide depth and story telling, to push the possibilities of genealogy to
its maximum. It recognises the constraints of genealogical research before the
time of parish records, but has not shied from a methodology to provide
detailed medieval genealogical analysis, using models of relationship to
present the earliest history of the family’s deep ancestry. It uses the
author’s professional legal experience in the application of rules of evidence
to present a genealogy which meets the higher standard of proof where that is
possible, but presents the probable, more likely than not, analysis when
certainty is impossible. It finds ways to push beyond perceptions of
constraints on genealogy to provide breadth (the story of a whole
family) and depth (probing into medieval records) and it also explores
how, when the genealogical research can go no further, historical research can
continue to tell the family story into deeper time.
Using the Time
Traveller’s Handbook
The Farndale
Story comprises a matrix of stories, each taking you on a journey into the
past.
Please start
by reading the Prologue,
top centre of the matrix.
You can
travel through time by exploring these stories in any order you like, or you
could take a more structured approach. The main story is told through numbered Acts,
of which there are 33, with links to them in bold red text. You can explore
these in any order, but it would make more sense to start with Act 1 – the Cradle about eight rows down
the Matrix. I suggest that you then follow the story in the numbered order,
which will first take you back in time through the history of the ancestral
lands of the family, and then take you forward in time. It’s up to you though.
Just go where the mood takes you.
You will
find the Local Story Explainers
in purple text. These provide more depth which you might like to explore as you
read the main story. They tell of local places and
historical events, and of historical factors which influenced our family.
You will find the Explainers
adjacent to the Stories
to which they apply.
Further
context is provided by the National Story Explainers, which gives a wider
perspective to the family and local history.
You can also
meet a few select individuals from the family, who best illustrate our
story at different periods of time. Whilst you can find every member of our
extended family from the Farndale
genealogies, the individuals here comprise a few folk who
help to tell the main story. Again you will find the individuals
adjacent to the Stories
of which they are a part.
You can also
find some detail about objects
and places which
tell our family story. The Story of our
family in thirty places and objects. If you find yourself in Yorkshire, you
could visit these places. Whilst one object is in the British Museum, the
places are otherwise clustered around the North York Moors, the Dales, the
Vales of York and Pickering, and Cleveland. These pages will tell you how to
get there and what you will see. If you can’t get there, they will describe the
places and objects, to help you visit them virtually. Again you will find the objects and places
adjacent to the Stories
to which they apply.
On each page
you will find hyperlinks. These will
generally take you to the more detailed research in pages on the wider website.
At the top
and bottom of each page you will find a link back to the main matrix. At the
bottom of the Story
pages, you will also find a link to the next chapter. So if you want to read
the story in order, you don’t have to return to the Matrix each time.
Our Ability to Time
Travel
We know that
the modern Farndale family are descended from the thirteenth century
agriculturalists, who cleared the land in the place known as Farndale from
about 1200, and were established tenant farmers by the end of that century.
Since
Farndale was a part of the estate of Kirkbymoorside, which was centred in the town of Kirkbymoorside and the
agricultural lands around Kirkdale, in
the time before lands started to be cleared in the Dales, our family can
explore its path through Norman, Scandinavian, Anglo Saxon and Roman times,
throughout which time the estate was a settled agricultural centre, at a place
of political influence and significance to the regional and national story.
When our
ancestors were clearing the valley of Farndale in the thirteenth century, this
was the same time when surnames started to be
used and then became hereditary. These thirteenth century individuals chose
to define themselves, and their descendants to follow, by the name Farndale.
In some cases, the medieval records tell us who were father and son and
daughter. It is not possible to be certain about the precise relationships of
all these individuals to each other. However we have been able to compile the
most probable family tree
of these early ancestors.
We know that
all modern Farndale descendants share the same ancestors from one family,
because in the early sixteenth century (when we know how they were related to
each other) almost all members of the family lived in Cleveland, north of the
moors for the next couple of centuries, and probably descend from two
individuals, Nicholas
and Agnes
Farndale. There is evidence that suggests that their son William
Farndale who died in Skelton in
Cleveland was the same William Farndale who married Margaret Atkinson in Campsall, just north of Doncaster in 1564. So it is likely that all
modern Farndales descend from the thirteenth century folk who lived in Farndale
via the medieval Doncastrians. There are other
possibilities, but we can build a model for the most probable early ancestry,
using the extensive medieval evidence available to us.
Some final advice
for Time Travellers
The Time
Traveller’s Matrix is a historical observation tool. When you travel back in
time, avoid the perils of the predestination
paradox, but enjoy reading and observing our story. Absorb the stories, and
let your imagination stretch out the family tales, to provide perspective to
the regional and national story. Use these building blocks to understand your
own story alongside the wider local and national story. Notice the historical
repetition, that reverberates into the contemporary age.
Now it’s
time to explore The Matrix.