I have met a mother and daughter from the other family - they were living only a few miles away from me. It was the older members of the family who got upset - the daughters of the milkman, old enough to regard being illegitimate as a dreadful thing.

My new cousins are so like other family members, and both have the slight lisp which is such a feature in the Tuvey bloodline. One of my cousins up in Yorkshire was very sceptical about it all, as there were name changes and lies about age to muddy the waters, but the family likeness is so strong that even without the photos and a few other bits and pieces which confirm the connection for me I accepted them as soon as I met them.

There is a mystery about my maternal line still to be resolved - I can find my great grandmother's marriage but she seems to come from nowhere, there is no trace of her under the surname she gave her illegitimate daughter, my grandmother who 'married' the milkman.

I am not concerned about the goings on - I was born only a few weeks after my parents married, and in most of the marriages I turned up the first child was born under six months later, but it was the way that it was such a scandal and had to be hidden. For the whole of her married life my mother pretended that the marriage took place a year earlier than it did.

On my paternal side the line was easy to trace back 200 years as each generation was born in the same place as the last and they worked in the local trades and factories the town is known for, linen weaving, 'driving' a steam engine for a saw mill and then at the glass works before my tiny granddad was apprenticed as a hair dresser. He was so small that he didn't serve in the Great War, being several inches under five feet tall.

I know that my father's family have to have roots across the North sea as he and my brother have the contraction of the tendons in their hands which is associated with descendants of the Vikings, but I am more interested in the people themselves, and have scoured the census records for addresses, employment, family names and maiden names - and found a lot of misspellings and misreading of handwriting.

Anne the Pleater :ootd: