When people first start looking into their family history, they are nearly always advised to begin by gathering together any documents or photographs already in the family’s possession and by asking questions of older family members. By the time I started researching my family history, there were few older family members still alive, and talking to those who were often raised more questions than were answered!

It proved impossible, for example, to establish exactly when my Great Grandfather, Thomas Mawson, had died. My mother and her cousin both thought it had been in the early 1950s but couldn’t pin it down more accurately. I was then (2004) working in central London and the Public Records Office was a short walk away in Myddelton Street, so I spent several lunch hours there, trawling through the large, heavy registers, trying to find the death of a Thomas Mawson in the late 40s/early 50s in or close to Millom in Cumberland, but with no success. The only death registration for a Thomas Mawson of approximately the right age who had died in the relevant period was in the September quarter of 1954 in Sunderland. Neither my mother nor her cousin could think of any reason why he would have died on the opposite side of the country so I was fairly sure that this wasn’t the right man.

However, not knowing when he died continued to niggle at me, so in June 2005 I finally ordered a copy of the death certificate for the man whose death was registered in Sunderland, mainly to rule him out, only to find that this was indeed my Great Grandfather, who had died on 10 June 1954, aged 84, in Sunderland General Hospital.

The certificate includes his home address ‘2 Marine View, Haverigg, Millom, Cumberland’ confirming that this is the right man, but I suspect I shall never know why he died in a hospital so far from home. His body was returned to Cumberland for burial at Holy Trinity Church in Millom, alongside his wife, Betsy, who had died in 1944.

My family did not preserve many old photographs but I do have one of Thomas taken in 1899 when he was 30. He is shown with Betsy (née Willan) and their daughters Elizabeth Annie (my grandmother, then aged four) and Bessie (a few months old).

Thomas and Betsy had had another daughter, Mary, who had been born on 8 August 1891 and died on 8 June 1895, aged only three. She was, apparently, always a frail child and Thomas made a small rocking chair for her which was still in the family when I was a child. I spent a wet Cumbrian afternoon, when I was a teenager, in the graveyard at Holy Trinity Church in Millom looking for Mary’s grave – probably the first time I showed any interest in family history. When I returned home, dripping wet and unsuccessful, my mother pointed out that the family wouldn’t have been able to have afforded a headstone for Mary. The grave of Thomas and Betsy is not marked either so I don’t know exactly where they are buried, though the same is true for most of my Cumbrian ancestors and members of their families. When I was last in Millom, I visited the local funeral directors, Sheldon (Funeral Services) Ltd, where staff members were very helpful and kindly looked up and copied for me their invoice from 1954, showing that the cost of Thomas’s funeral was £18 6s. Unfortunately they weren’t able to help me to locate his and Betsy’s grave, although they had previously been able to identify the location of my Grandfather’s unmarked grave, but that’s another story!