Every family tree has names that are little more than dates, and others that slowly gather into a person. My great-great-grandmother Rose Edith Ferry is one of the ones who has come into focus — a Tyneside woman whose whole life, as far as the records show, was lived within a few square miles of Newcastle upon Tyne. Source: Tyne & Wear Building Preservation Trust A daughter of the East End Rose was born in 1883 in Newcastle upon Tyne, one of the daughters of Zephaniah and Mar

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

Every so often in family history you find an ancestor whose whole life seems to belong to a single place. My fifth great-grandfather, Robert Ferry, is one of those. When he died in November 1863, the Newcastle Guardian marked his passing with a few lines that say more than most gravestones: At Low Hall, Farnacres, on the 8th inst., aged 84, Mr Robt. Ferry, much respected. The deceased, for the long period of 66 years, was gardener to the family of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenswo

The story of my 4th great-grandmother Esther Pilgrim Ferry (née Berry), her potter sons, 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 later years halfw