Welcome to Roots and RabbitholesWelcome to Roots and Rabbitholes, a place where my journey into family history comes to life. What began as a personal curiosity, piecing together names, dates, and stories from scattered records, quickly became a deep and ongoing exploration of the people and places that shaped my family.
With a background as a biochemist and scientist, I bring an analytical eye to genealogy, combining evidence-based research with a passion for uncovering human stories. I created this website as a central repository for my work, bringing together documents, photographs, maps, and narratives so they can be preserved, shared, and built upon. Here, you’ll find the threads of my ancestry woven into a broader tapestry of history, culture, and place—a record not only of where I come from, but of the connections that continue to shape who I am.
This is a living archive. The stories, data, and records on this site represent the best available evidence at the time of writing — but genealogical research is a continuous process. New documents surface, archives are digitised, and records are reinterpreted. Ancestor stories will be updated and expanded as research develops, and where conclusions are uncertain or preliminary, this is clearly noted. If you are related to any of the families here and have information, photographs, or documents to share, please get in touch via the Contact page.
Researching…
Ancestral Lines include:
Butt
Durrant
Pluck
Grimshaw
Jacobs
Birchall
Hilker
Stapleton
Burket
Hamblin
Wells
Pendred
Henderson
Gubbs
Whincup
Wright
Gorey
East
Worthington
Fleming
Williams
Grant
Odam
Rands
Tripp
Holmes
Welton
Steel
Exploring the Data
Beyond the individual stories, this site examines the family analytically — finding patterns in the records, mapping where ancestors lived and worked, and placing individual lives within the sweep of history.
Lives RememberedWhen I look across these lives, what strikes me most is not the history they lived through, but how many times they nearly didn't survive it. A shell at Acre landing a few feet differently. A fever in an Indian cantonment running a little higher. A German teenager in a Stade tavern saying no to the recruiting agent. A POW not making it through a reprisal camp where fewer than one in six survived. A widow in Fordington or Portsmouth simply not being strong enough to hold what remained together. Any one of those — and I don't exist.
The mortality data tells one story: a family that, generation by generation, lived longer and died quieter than the one before it. But behind that data are the lives that made it possible. A Suffolk Marine who survived years at sea long enough to anchor the family in Portsmouth. A Hanoverian drummer who crossed continents and somehow became accidentally British. Women in Fordington and Southsea who buried mothers, siblings and infants and kept going anyway. Men in lethal engine rooms and on the frontlines of world wars who took risks that usually end stories rather than continue them.
Not one of these people died violently, despite everything the nineteenth and twentieth centuries threw at them. They came back from Jutland, from a reprisal camp in Latvia, from the Blitz landing on their own street, from decades of hard institutional service, and they died in bed, of illness, in old age. That is not simply luck. It is resilience — the particular, costly, undocumented kind that working-class families produced in quantity and that history rarely records.
These stories are the beginning. This is a hobby pursued with care rather than speed. New stories, timelines, and data will be added as the research allows, but genealogical work takes time and each ancestor deserves to be done properly. Return visits are always rewarded.
If you recognise a name or have a family connection to any of the lines researched here, please get in touch via the Contact page — all contributions, corrections, and conversations are welcome.
