Most of the family history I write about belongs to the North East, but one strand of my tree begins somewhere quite different: in the schoolrooms of Westminster. These are the Berrys, my London family, and their story makes a fascinating counterpoint to the Ferrys up north over the very same decades. The two were tied together by a single marriage — and by a name that travelled the length of England. A schoolmaster and his wife At the head of the London line stand Augustine

The story of my 4th great-grandmother Esther Pilgrim Ferry (née Berry), her potter sons, artist daughter and the brother who stayed behind. When I first started pulling on this thread, one detail really caught my attention. My 4th great-grandmother, Esther Pilgrim Ferry, died in 1909 not in the north of England where she'd raised her family, but in Brunswick, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. She was 87. So I kept asking myself the obvious question: what took a woman in her l