<\/p>
My late thirties saw me standing at a crossroads, having learnt that my wife and I wouldn\u2019t be able to have children. I\u2019ve always felt that family is a harbour, a place of shelter during storms, but also the embarkation point for great adventures \u2013 and now I found myself cast adrift in the middle of the ocean. So while my contemporaries threw themselves into the all-encompassing business of raising young families, and looked to the future, I turned to face the past.\u00a0<\/p>
I knew very little about the paternal side of my tree. My Dad, an only child, had died in 1973, aged 38, and my grandfather had died a few months later, so I was four when I inherited the crumbling ancestral home at Temple Sowerby in Cumbria. This was a 17th century<\/a> farmhouse on to which a symmetrical front had been added in Georgian times. It was riddled with dry rot by the time I knew it, and had finally been sold in 1977 to be converted into a hotel.\u00a0<\/p> One day, about 10 years ago, I was at my mother\u2019s house, rootling around in a cupboard, when high up on a shelf I found a family tree in dad\u2019s handwriting mapped out on a long roll of graph paper. There was also a cardboard box full of bundles of letters tied up with faded pink ribbon, mostly dating from the early 19th century. It took a while to get used to the copperplate script, but reading these letters felt like I was throwing open a window to the past. Mostly they concerned trades that my ancestors were engaged in two centuries ago \u2013 banking, farming, mining, tanning \u2013 which confirmed them, as I\u2019d always suspected, to have been lower-rung Westmorland gentry. But there was one document that made my jaw drop. This was a \u2018List of Negroes\u2019 \u2013 an inventory giving the name, age, employment and value in sterling of each of the 196 enslaved workers on a sugar plantation in Jamaica<\/a> in 1801.\u00a0<\/p> There was one document that made my jaw drop. This was a \u2018List of Negroes\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote> This disturbing discovery would alter the course of my life. I couldn\u2019t simply sweep it under the carpet; I couldn\u2019t just pretend that nothing had happened.<\/p> Like many novice family historians, I signed up to Ancestry<\/a> and hungrily fell upon its all-you-can-eat buffet of records. I also spent countless hours searching for \u2018atkinson\u2019 online, along with any other words that might summon up my ancestors.<\/p>