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THERE could be no doubt about it – Julie was a handful. Brought up by her grandparents when her wayward mother took off, Julie seemed to have spent her young life on a mission to prove that she was no

I’M up at my mum’s old house, going through a trunk full of photographs. There is a biscuit tin of medals here, awarded to my grandfathers after World War I. I pull one of them out and realise it was

THE boy was a scrawny little thing with some smudges on his face. He stood in our hall with a label tied to his small case and another pinned on his clothes, just staring around at everything as if he

Researching Welsh roots can be a challenge, since you usually have to contend with the overlapping identities of ancestors amid the swirl of patronymic names, endless recycling of first names, and a l

When I was a child, we had a tortoise called Winnie who had belonged to my father when he was a boy in the 1950s. He called his pet Winston after Churchill, but this name had to be changed when he dis

I remember, many years ago, a potential client making a very specific request. They wanted me to research their family but they were only interested in the direct male line. ‘I don’t want to know abou