Above you will find some of the photographs that appear in my new book 'Vanishing Ireland - Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World'. Launched on October 14th in Dublin city it is available in all good book stores, as well a amazon.
Special limited edition prints are available from both volumes of Vanishing Ireland - should you be interested feel free to get in touch.
~ About The Project
~ Introduction
Click here to view James and Turtle talk of ancient humour, barefoot children and the good old, bad old days with Mark Cagney and Elaine Crowley of TV3. The interview was repeated on Ireland AM's best of the week review on Saturday 31st October.
Click here to listen to Turtle discuss the Vanishing Ireand Project with Ryan Tubridy on RTE Radio 1 on Bank Holiday Monday 26th August. Turtle appears at 39 minutes into the show.
Click here to listen to James and Turtle talk with Tom Dunne on Newstalk Thursday 18th December 2009. Forward to about 18 minutes into part 2.
Click here to listen to James and Turtle talk with Matt Cooper on Today FM Friday 11th of December 2010.
THE IRISH TIMES MAGAZINE 28 November 2009
Faces Full Of Stories
By Miriam Mulcahy.
SOCIAL HISTORY: With their second volume of ‘Vanishing Ireland’, historian Turtle Bunbury and photographer James Fennell have once again documented stories that would otherwise be lost. They tell Miriam Mulcahy about their search for characters and a good yarn
TURTLE BUNBURY AND James Fennell, childhood friends since school days in Dalkey, are disconcertingly like brothers. They finish each other’s sentences, and have a visible shorthand of communication honed by years of working together. Fennell’s house, where we meet, is the converted stable block of his family home outside Ballitore, Co Kildare. Antique chairs politely gather around the time-worn, scarred oak table. Old prints line the walls. A dog is gnawing away at a bone at my feet.
The Fennells were once Quakers. Fennell thinks one of his ancestors came over with Cromwell and was kicked out of the army for turning Quaker. Bunbury’s family owns Lisnavagh House and demesne outside Rathvilly in Carlow, which has been in the family since 1702. He’s a keen historian and loath to reveal the provenance of his unusual name. He finally does: he was the third boy and his father called him Tertius, Latin for third. His granny then called him Turtle, and it stuck. You can imagine how many times he has been asked the question.
Their latest collaboration is the second volume of Vanishing Ireland: Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World , for which they travelled around Ireland, interviewing and photographing life’s veterans in remote townlands and villages.
Bunbury catalogues the interiors of their homes with the keen eye of a magpie, captures the family history, recounts memories of disappeared brothers and sisters lost to tuberculosis or emigration, fills the accounts with illuminating details of abandoned cars, abandoned educations, imagined hopes and dreams. Fennell captures his subjects inside and outside their homes, sitting on favourite chairs, holding accordions or fiddles, sitting beside cavernous hearths, walking through fields and down lanes with their dogs. There are coats tied with twine, rheumy eyes, a kitchen full of boots, and faces full of stories.
It’s a winning combination and these books are important records of social history. What started them off? They began their collaboration with a series of freelance travel articles, which grew into handsome coffee table books focusing on exotic interiors. “We’d go to places such as Zimbabwe, Mexico and Sri Lanka, track down the best possible houses we could find to photograph, and then come back and sell the stories,” Bunbury explains.
The Vanishing Ireland project began almost by chance, when he began to collect histories of local people around the family estate of Lisnavagh.
“I started taking photographs of some of the characters,” says Fennell. “And I think we both had the same idea – we saw the potential in it and decided to work on it together.”
An extensive network of friends around the country supplied them with names of interesting locals. From there, they progressed to making inquiries in small villages. “We would go to a post office or a pub and ask, ‘Who is the oldest person around, with some good stories to tell?’ That’s what we were after, and there was no shortage of them,” says Bunbury.
Fennell especially enjoyed photographing bachelors. “Their houses are so unchanged, and they have a slightly wicked glint in the eye. There’s a serious spark out of them.”
Yes, there are more men than women in the book but that’s because they have found women to be particularly averse to having their photo taken.
“Some of them would not be that into it, initially, and you might have to talk them round a little bit to let me take the picture,” says Fennell. “Women especially didn’t like it. It was very disappointing, because for the first volume we had very few women, and we really wanted more of their slant on life for the second book.”
Bunbury loved collecting the individual stories. “I’m first and foremost an historian so for me it’s amazing to have history brought to life through talking to people who have lived through very different – though very recent – times. Suddenly, the whole spectrum of life as it lived in Ireland is coloured in by real living people and their stories. It has definitely given me a much deeper sense of what Irish history’s about.”
There have been many road trips, most memorably those undertaken for their book The Irish Pub , which was published last year. Fennell recalls driving from Kerry to Derry, and trying to visit every county in Ireland. Bunbury delights in the end result and says they were lucky to have begun the project just before the closure of so many rural pubs. “The pub book also provided us with a general excuse to be allowed out,” he laughs. Both are young fathers.
For Fennell, their travels are nothing less than an intensive course in Irish history, with his very own in-car tutor. “Everywhere I drive with Turtle, he knows pretty much what has happened in the locality. I bring all these CDs with me but I never get a chance to listen to any of them.”
Fennell is shooting three books this year, including The Irish Country House with the Knight of Glin. Their next joint book will be about Irish sporting legends.
Bunbury published a history of the Dublin docklands last February, An Urban Voyage , and has launched an ambitious family history project. “It’s called Your History in a Book . I’ve got lots of clients, and hopefully it’s the type of thing I can expand.”
Both stress the importance of local history. “Surely the Government must realise that it’s the history, the people, the fabric of old Ireland that visitors come to see. It’s the past, it’s the guys in this book – that’s who the tourists hope to meet when they go into an Irish pub.”
Bunbury believes everyone should record their family histories, and not forget the elders in the neighbourhood. “I’d like to encourage families and individuals to keep of record of their lives, to get children involved, to upload projects to the internet and take photographs when you can. I think that would be a huge plus.”
THE SUNDAY TRIBUNE Sunday 25th October
FORGOTTEN IRELAND
By Claire O'Mahony
The history books tell us of the hardship that existed in '40s and '50s' Ireland. But how did people cope, what was life really like, and what did they do for fun? Two new books go back in time to shine a light into a fascinating and long-forgotten way of life. Claire O'Mahony meets the books' authors.
History books are too often filled with details, believes the historian Turtle Bunbury. "In a hundred years time, it will probably be all about the Lisbon treaty, but really that doesn't affect what we do on a day-to-day basis – it's more interesting how we all get about, what we're at and what we're thinking."
It's his fascination with ordinary people that has culminated in the book Vanishing Ireland: Further chronicles of a disappearing world, where he has captured the tales of Irish elders, photographed by James Fennell. This is the second time they've tackled such a project.
"I love sitting down and chatting to people of senior vintage," Bunbury explains about returning to this subject matter. In the book, we meet 106-year-old Statia, whose mother was born in 1862 while Abraham Lincoln was president of America and the pedal bike hadn't been yet invented. There's 92-year-old Cathy, who met her husband at an illicit house dance (the Catholic Church considered them immoral) and bachelor brothers Timmy and Stevie Kelleher (84 and 79) who are grateful never to have married and say in unison: "And thanks be to Christ for that."
"I don't know how our parents fed us but they did," says Stevie. "It's great the way it is today but – and I've said it in pubs – the youth of today wouldn't do what we did. They'd die with the hunger."
The cover of the book features Baby Rudden, an 86-year-old farmer from Cavan who left school at 12 to help her parents, never married and spent her life on the farm. One of the most engaging interviewees is 69-year-old Willie Davey, a labourer who might wear a rock n' roll tee-shirt and a necklace but who doesn't feel at home in modern society, with its telephones and DVDs. Of the younger generation he says: "They won't listen and they'd nearly be asking you 'What is a bog?'"
From publicans to farmers, gravediggers and water diviners, Bunbury and Fennell have assorted a memorable collection of people, who are products of their time. "What I'm always trying to find are people whose stories have never been told," Bunbury says. "When people tell me about some ordinary farmer who's 84 and never goes out, I immediately want to go and find him. You'd be hard-pushed to get to your 80s and not have some stories to tell."
These are people whose lives were shaped by wars and emigration but also of storytelling, music and crafts. The interviewees' thoughts on modern Ireland varied wildly and Bunbury says he was surprised by the number of people who are enthusiastic about the health service and the way people are looked after. "But they're from an age when people were grateful for anything that came their way and that's what we've all forgotten," he says. "There was a lot of hardship but some of them seemed quite confused by how much cash we all have these days. They're amazed: we have heating, electricity, running water, all of theses things and yet we seem to be complaining as much as ever."
To find participants for their first book, Bunbury and Fennell went around the country, arriving into villages and asked local historians to point them in the right direction. This time around, a lot of people contacted them on the back of the first book, but it was still remained very much a word-of-mouth thing. "You get to an area and people tell you, 'Do you know who you should meet…'. We had various people – scouts – who were tracking down interesting characters for us."
As a book, it has a certain poignancy, especially as Bunbury says, because they're constantly raising a glass to the memories of some participants. If they achieve anything with the book, he hopes it is that it provides an impetus for people to visit an elderly person nearby and say hello ever now and then. "I myself live in the countryside and sometimes you can feel completely abandoned," he says. "Certainly in the past, some of these people would have relied on the church – and the pub – but these are uncertain things now. The post office – gone. All these things are gone and it can be really hard for them."
LEITRIM GUARDIAN
By Sue, Lady Kilbracken
Since the closure of Longfield in March 1999, the chances of the residents of Carrigallen and the surrounding area seeing Teresa McGerty, Johnny Fyfe and Johnny ‘The Goudly’ Golden together under one roof has been rare. Now they have that opportunity in a spectacular new collection of evocative photographs and charming interviews compiled in a book called ‘Vanishing Ireland’
This is the second volume of the ‘Vanishing Ireland’ project, which chronicles a cross section of Irish society that is slowly fading from our world. Over the course of 2009, James Fennell and Turtle Bunbury travelled the length and breadth of the country, documenting the lives of forty-one men and women.
“The feedback we received for the first volume was both astonishing and deeply encouraging. Many letters came from people who wished they had taken the time to write down the stories of their now deceased family elders,” says Turtle. “We have sought out souls of a positive nature who do not simply link us to the past but, perhaps more importantly, provide us with wisdom and humour to take on the future. It has been an immense privilege for us to listen to these stories and to have the past reincarnated by those who lived through it.”
Not only does it highlight the disappearing ways and traditions of Irish life, the magnificent photographs place each of those interviewed in the setting of their homes. Next to portraits of the forty-one characters are breathtaking scenes of lakes, rugged landscapes and white-washed cottages in isolated windswept terrain. We are given an intimate peek inside some of the cottages and the farmyards come alive with ducks, chickens, donkeys and dogs. For a moment you are transported and around Carrigallen, want to watch out for ‘The Gouldy’ purring by on his Honda 70.
A sensitive and profound insight into the fading world of old Ireland, told through the stories and photographs of craftsmen, musicians, sportsmen, farmers, traders, nuns, gentry and centenarians, this enchanting book would be a gem on any coffee table and promises to become a collector’s item.
For anyone with a love of history or a love of Ireland or both, ‘Vanishing Ireland - Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World', by James Fennell and Turtle Bunbury can be purchased at all good bookshops.
IRISH EXAMINER 6 NOVEMBER 2009
A UNIQUE WINDOW ON A FORGORTTEN IRELAND
By Richard Fitzpatrick.
The fading recollections of a dying generation are our pignant last link to a bygone era,.
Born in 1903, Anastasia Kealy is the oldest person to feature in Vanishing Ireland, the second volume of profiles of everyday elderly Irish people to be published by writer Turtle Bunbury and photographer James Fennell.
Remarkably, Anastasia, or Statia as she’s known to intimates, lives on her own in Rathdowney, Co Laois. Her mother was born in 1862, years before the bicycle was invented. She was ninth of 13 children born to her parents, but in similar fashion to nearly all of those featured in Vanishing Ireland, many of her siblings – six in a row at one stage – died in childhood.
Along with infant mortality, there are a lot of common threads running through the experiences of those called on to reminisce in this exquisite collection – enforced emigration, mostly to England, and a vibrant social scene in rural Ireland, particularly amongst farmers who bandied together for work and craic at night-time in each other’s houses, being the most evocative.
Furthermore, those interviewed seem to imbue an innate stoicism and hardiness. In their day, children thought nothing of returning from school to spend a few hours picking potatoes or cutting turf. The notion of walking 20 miles to get to work is shrugged at. Baby Rudden, for example, a farmer from rural Co Cavan, born in 1923, remembers walking barefoot for “near an hour” to get to school. Sometimes on wet days, her father would walk with herself and her brothers and sister, beating back thistles and water off the ferns on rocks so they wouldn’t get their legs wet.
The penury they endured haunts their accounts. Willie Davey, a tearaway – and labourer by trade –from Ballymote in Co Sligo remembers that if you left your lunch too long in the desk at school, a rat would get at it. Most days he only had a piece of bread, if he had a lunch, to bring to school, “and when you come back home you wouldn’t have a lot more,” he adds.
In Westland Row’s inner-city Dublin parish, recall Sonny Kinsella and Bart Nolan, it was commonplace for four families to share one tap and one toilet in houses that would accommodate over 40 people. Getting to sleep in these houses, they recount, was always difficult as they were constantly alive the noise of coalmen coughing and babies crying; not to mention the occasional screaming mother.
The loss of so many great songs from our collective memory is bemoaned. Farming, it is argued convincingly, was a much more sociable way of life before the advent of tractors. The book is full of enchanting detail and recollections.
Joe McCabe, from Abbeyleix in Co Laois, was born in 1919 and was a noted hurler in his parish and county. As a child, he was borne along by the tales of the Laois team which won the 1915 All-Ireland hurling title. The weather had been so wet the day of the final that the two teams played the second half of the match in overcoats.
The summer of 1946 is vividly recalled, a season when the countryside was flocked with thousands of civil servants and office workers from Dublin, there to help save the harvest.
The ferociously cold winter of 1947 is also mentioned. In late February of that year, the greatest snowfall the country experienced in the last century lasted for nearly 48 hours. Known as “The Big Snow” or “The Blizzard”, it was 40 days before the last vestiges of snow disappeared.
Many lost their lives during the snowfall. Francie McFadden, a gravedigger from Carrigans Upper, Co Sligo, remembers that two colleagues of his father were caught in a snowdrift while returning from the bog. They were found four days later with the bags of turf frozen on their backs.
There is a wonderful chapter about the life of John Mathis who was born in 1927. A bachelor, he lives on his own with his dog Chester and a cat, which, notes Bunbury, “has not yet earned a name”. He worked as a thatcher all his life, following in the footsteps of his father and uncles.
The discipline hasn’t changed in a thousand years, he maintains. Like with many crafts, it’s all in the hands. He says the worst part of his vocation was that it can be “a cold, old job”, especially on the hands, as everyone wants their house thatched in the late autumn when the straw is fresh from the fields.
In fact, those profiled made their living from a host of trades that are fading from our world – such as blacksmiths, lace-makers, seamstresses, water-diviners, sextons and butlers.
Of course, we’ll always have gravediggers. Francie McFadden isn’t sure how many graves he has dug. In the old days he used to travel around on a Honda 50 with a shovel, pickaxe and 14-pound sledge strapped to the side of his motorbike. Nowadays, the 80-year-old widower gets about by tractor, but hasn’t come to delegate any of his work. “I still dig them yet,” he says.
RTE GUIDE 7-13 November
OUT OF THE PAST
By Donal O’Donoghue.
‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the …’. Hang on a second Mister Yeats, the rosy-tinged times of yesteryear are not altogether dead and buried, what with Vanishing Ireland: Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World, a coffee table book that taps into the rare old times.
Rather than a cup of Java, maybe you’d be better armed with a steaming mug of tea as this is not your usual ornamental publication. With its colloquial biographical account (Turtle Bunbury) and accompanying portraits (James Fennell), we get to sit down with a generation who survived the emergency, waded through a recession deeper than our own and lived to tell their tales.
Vanishing Ireland recalls that increasingly foreign country, a past when people did such strange things as actually visit each other to have a chat and children walked barefoot to school (albeit through fields of nettles) and a family of eight was pooh-poohed as smallish. Of course it was not the best of times – teachers could be brutal in measuring out corporal punishment, the church had a stranglehold on the nation’s conscience and living conditions were primitive for most – this book is definitely not all dewy-eyed romanticism.
‘Keep your eyes open, your legs closed and send home your money’, was the advice doled out to Jack Conolly’s four sisters when they took the boat to America. Then there’s Joe Muldoon, twice married and now living along on his farm in Ballymote, Co Sligo, who remembers a former schoolteacher that once ‘threw the full fist into the side of my face and splayed blood up onto the roof’. Years later the grown-up Joe meted out his blood reveng at a céilí.
The follow up to Vanishing Ireland (it seems that Ireland was not vanishing quite as fast as Mr Bunbury thought) is a sobering look back from these overfed times at photographs and memories of a generation that is disappearing.
We encounter Baby Rudden (farmer), the animated Betty Scott (cook and actress) and the bachelor brothers, Timmy and Stevie Kelleher from Dingle. Some characters just wander into the frame and the story. Like the day Bunbury was beetling about Westport and Mick Lavelle innocently stepped into Moran’s shop. A local character and regular entertainer at Matt Molloy’s hostelry, the 1999 Culchie of the Year winner has his own spin on how the world turns. ‘Everyone’s so busy now’, he tells the author. ‘Well, there will be plenty of time when we’re dead and gone’.
THE CARLOW NATIONALIST, 14 October 2009
Capturing the terrible beauty By William Paterson.
The terrible beauty of vanishing Ireland, in lines of Yeats during the Easter uprising, is being recorded before it disappears forever by a distinguished writer-photographer team – Turtle Bunbury and James Fennell which has led to the launch of their second book on the theme this week in Dublin.
Turtle lives not so very far from Baltinglass with wife Ally and very young daughters Jemima and Bay while James resides in a converted stable close to the border in Kildare with wife Joanna and daughters Bella and Mimi.
In their first book, Turtle wrote “The generation who knew Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s is rapidly disappearing. The days of the ‘golden codger’ - as W B Yeats once called them - will soon be at an end. They are dying off, fading out, literally vanishing from the earth”
Elsewhere he writes “Rural villages have been smothered in suburbs. Farming is no longer a simple collaboration between man, beast and soil”
Their first book on this theme was called ‘Vanishing Ireland’. The second, launched this Wednesday, is titled ‘Vanishing Ireland – Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World’.
Fennell’s ancient Quaker stock comes out clearly in the love of humanity which emerges from every photograph he takes, while Bunbury’s intimate knowledge of Irish country life (he was actually born in Rathvilly) blends his extensive historical studies into a profound text.
Bunbury and Fennell teamed up to produce the memorable coffee-table volume ‘Living in Sri Lanka’ filled with graceful eastern interiors and text.
More recently, they published a book on the fast-disappearing pubs of Ireland under the title of ‘The Irish Pub’ and ‘Vanishing Ireland’ which records the faces and lives of the old Ireland.
Their new volume, 'Vanishing Ireland – Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World’ which was launched in Dublin today, records more of Ireland’s fading rural world.
THE IMPARTIAL REPORTER - Thursday, 17th September, 2009
Inishmore farmer's history in chronicle of a vanishing Irelannd BY Meadhb Monaghan.
A farmer from Inishmore, Lisbellaw will appear in a novel that recounts the "memories, mind-sets and thoughts of the older generation who are rapidly fading away".
John Carson has lived at Isle View, Inishmore Island all his life. He was one of a number of elderly people from across Ireland who told their stories and family histories to author, Turtle Bunbury, an award-winning writer and historical consultant from County Carlow.
Turtle met John while visiting his sister-in-law, Liz Moore (Manager of the Belle Isle School of Cookery) on Inishmore and the result was an evocative tale of John's family life since his ancestors left Devon in the seventeenth century until the present day, where John farms his land with the help of his son and three Massey Ferguson tractors.
A captivating photograph of the 80-year-old farmer appears in Turtle's latest book, 'Vanishing Ireland, Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World', a sequel to the "huge hit" that was his 2006 'Vanishing Ireland' book.
Turtle grew up in Carlow and studied History at Trinity College Dublin. From there he travelled to Hong Kong and worked as a "roving reporter" for the South China Morning Post. Returning to Ireland ten years ago, he established himself as an energetic writer who has published seven books since 2004. He has also travelled extensively, most notably in the USA, Mexico, Africa, Australia and south-east Asia. His work on Sri Lanka earned him the award for Ireland's Long-haul Travel Journalist of the Year in 2006. He is married to Ally Bunbury from County Monaghan and has a keen interest in the history of the border counties, indeed an elderly lady called 'Baby' Rudden, from Redhills, County Cavan appears on the cover of 'Vanishing Ireland'.
Describing his second 'Vanishing Ireland' book, Turtle said: "From the rugged slopes of the Dingle Peninsula to Dublin's docklands, this book captures an age that is often unrecognisable in today's world. People recall lives shaped by the Black and Tans, emigration, the Spanish Flu and walking barefoot to school. But the overriding memories they share conjure up an era when life was somehow simpler, when people took pride in the land, when they understood ring forts and holy trees and treasured the spirituality and beauty of the countryside. They remember the importance of family, of friendships; and a time when music, storytelling, song and laughter were a vital part of everyday life.
"Farmers and blacksmiths, publicans and water diviners, thatchers and musicians gather to tell their stories about this remarkable age, giving a glimpse of the inimitable spirit and warmth of the people who shaped the cultural identity of Ireland."
Referring to John's story, Turtle writes: "John is an expressive man, with a kindly, crinkly face. Photographs mean a lot to him. They hang on walls, stand upon shelves and sleep in albums in every room of the house. We flick through an album. There's his parents, standing straight, out by the old house. And that's wee William, his younger brother, who 'died last harvest'. Here we have a smattering of his grandchildren, scattered through the latitudes these days from New Zealand to Belfast. The young ones come up to play on the farm sometimes, pow-pow gun-games behind the cattle troughs, sliding in the muddy lanes. And there's his daughter and her husband, the one who lost half his face during the Remembrance Day bomb blast in Enniskillen back in 1987. And there's John, in his UDR uniform, attending the funeral of Jimmy Graham, one of three brothers gunned down in the 1980s.
"When John talks of the bad times, his voice becomes suddenly sterner, his sentences brusquer, his posture stiffer. 'It's still there at the back of the whole thing,' he says. 'And it always will be.' He was nineteen when he joined the B-Specials of the Home Guard and he stayed with them for 22 years. During that time, they went head-to-head against the IRA in an aggressive border campaign that the B-Specials eventually won. That said, John says he had a relatively peaceful time and 'never saw anyone insulted or upset'. After the B-Specials were disbanded in 1967, John joined the Ulster Defence Regiment with whom he remained with for the next ten years. He is considerably more open than many on the subject but it is still not an area he feels comfortable talking about."
John also told Turtle humorous family anecdotes which reflect life in by-gone times. Turtle writes: "John's grandfather, also called John, had farmed pigs in Kinawley, bringing them to the market in Enniskillen. Fair Day in Enniskillen was a lively affair but many a farmer was bankrupted by swiping hands amid the jostling crowds. To confound the pickpockets, Granny Carson made her husband a special wallet to keep in his crotch. The younger John tells the story of an old neighbour who had a similarly located purse, although his was designed to protect his fortune from his two insatiably drunken sisters. 'This man subsequently fell in love with a pretty girl and told her of his wealth. 'Aye,' said she, 'I hear the bee but where's the honey.' He said, 'Put your hand down there and you'll find all the honey you need!'"
Turtle recounts how John was born in 1928 and was the first of three sons. Like most children on the island, he attended the now-ruined Methodist school at Slee, established during the Great Famine, where his aunt was the teacher. When he was 17 he bought his uncle's 80 acre farm and at 22 he married Florence in Maguire's Bridge in 1952 and went on to have six daughters and a son.
"It was a very happy marriage and lasted nearly fifty years until Florence's death in 2001. Their first grandson was born in Australia on her first anniversary, an event that greatly moved John," Turtle wrote.
Turtle commented: "I met John through my sister-in-law and thought he was an interesting man. The fact he was in the B Specials is interesting because I didn't come across much of that when I was interviewing people in the south of Ireland. You'd be talking to a farmer in Kerry and a farmer in Fermanagh and they would have so many interesting and different stories to tell."
He added that his first 'Vanishing Ireland' book, with photos by his friend James Fennell (who has also taken the pictures for this book) was such a huge hit that they decided to make a second one featuring even more "old timers" who are "rapidly fading away."
Turtle is currently working on a new project called 'Your History in a Book' and has received quite a few commissions from people who want his help in tracing and compiling their family tree as a keepsake or present. He says that "there is an increasing interest in the past with shows like 'Who Do You Think You Are'.
"People definitely get more interested in the past as they grow older."
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