I started researching my family background in May 2006 when looking for information on my dad's mother who had died in childbirth. Once started I  found the detective work compelling, and one unexplored branch leads to another, and another..those damned brickwalls

On my father's side my connections are in England's Yorkshire North Riding and County Durham, and in Ayrshire and Stirlingshire in Scotland. His gr grandfather John Bryce was brought up in Dalry, Ayrshire. Along with a third of the Scottish population his family were employed in the domestic handloom weaving industry. Prosperous before the Napoleonic Wars, from the 1820's weavers suffered extreme poverty due to the labour glut from returning servicemen and large Irish immigration, which combined to drive down wages.  This was compounded by the relentless growth of industrial mechanisation that drove down piece prices. John Bryce, however, became a blacksmith in the booming mining industry of the area. His skills were transferable from the iron and coal mining of Ayrshire to the lead mining industry in the Eskdale area of Yorkshire's North Riding. John and wife Elizabeth had lost five children in infancy in Dalry and Kilbirnie, but one son, James, survived to make the move south. James married a local girl whose recent anscestors were Teesside and North Riding stonemasons, potters, farmers, Whitby mariners and ironstone and lead miners.

On my mother's side my ancestors hail from the rural English East Midlands counties of Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire. My only claim to genealogical fame (or infamy) is that I share 7x grandfather, Thomas Manning from Ringstead, near Thrapston, with distant cousin Margaret Hilda Roberts, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, who became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Many of my East Midlands forbears were agricultural labourers. This was no Constable rural idyll, especially after the Napoleonic Wars, when a variety of factors conspired to reduce much of the agricultural population to poverty and cramped living conditions in tiny terraced cottages. Women in the family often supplemented family income as lace makers, but 19th century mechanisation effectively made their work uneconomic, adding to the general poverty of the era. Northamptonshire has long been a centre of boot and shoe making, so there are plenty of shoe makers too, and a couple of lines of carpenters and wheelwrights. Shoe making, one of the last cottage industries, and among the last to be unionised, was also amongst the poorest paid. Contemporary c19th reports put Northants cottages as amongst the most cramped in England. In many ways this was the century that defined the English working class, with decline in agricultural employment and cottage industries and the growth of towns and factories, which gave conditions for the labour movement to thrive. Indeed, Ringstead provided one third of the 115 Raunds boot makers who petitioned Parliament in 1905 in the first ever march of its kind by an organised body.

Carrying the name Bryce makes me a clansman of the MacFarlanes. But then, as Thomas Bryce seems to have deserted grgrgr grandma Betty after getting her in the family way, I suppose we would be more assocoiated with her Chalmers folk and Clan Cameron. Not such a bad thing maybe, because not for nothing is the full moon known as the McFarlane lantern...they were cattle rustlers.

But as McFarlane clansfolk say,Loch Sloy (Springtime's comin')

Richard Bryce

Thanks to: Don and Marion Chapman, Ken Stanger, Howard Umph, Forrest Manning,Tanya Harrington, Norman Bellamy, Wendy Birt, Jacki Brooks, Rosalind Bolton, Alan Clarke, Trevor Hewson, Paul Joiner, Sally Edwards, Ruth Enns, Marion Fielding, Meg Greenwood, Sandy Hall, Lynn Jones, Debbie McCollum, Mary Paton, Allan Scotson, Shelly Shock, Mark Stevens, Dianne Sutton, Susan Tall, Mary Taylor, Gus Wilde, Jenny Williams, and anyone I've missed (my apologies).