Family History Research

My family name is Catherall, and some years ago I was told by someone who purports to have known about these things (earned his living writing ancestral family trees for people), that the origins of the name were Scandanavian.  To be more precise, Viking.  Now that immediately accounted for one thing which has always been on my mind since about the age of fourteen.  Why I seemed to have a more than unhealthy appetite for rape and pillage.  Now I know.

So this bloke tells me that the name originated from Norway and in it’s basic form was Cat-ter-hail.  Which means The Tail of a Cat.  Now, before you ladies start to think unwarranted things about my undergarments and what is contained therein, let me explain a little more.  This bloke said that the name was used to indicate a thin strip of uncultivated land at the edge of a field and before the large drop off a cliff into a large cold wet Ffiord.  A ‘Cats Tail’, see?  Easy when you it’s explained to you isn’t it?  Particularly the uncultivated part.

So, to cut a long story short, my cousin Judith, not to be confused with my sister of the same name, has done massive amounts of research into the Catheralls and discovered that we originated in north Wales from about the 1560’s.  At which time they came to the notice of the local chieftain (or whatever the head man of the village was called at that time).  The reason the family came to the notice of said chieftain was because of a complaint of sheep worrying going on in the hills of north Wales at that time.  Some things don’t change do they? - nothing new there.

And the family carried on for hundreds and hundred of years and became very very boring.  Some of them ran the village shop, the pub, built a brick works, became very rich during the Industrial Revolution in the (when was it? – oh yes, the 1800’s) and generally made a bit of a name for themselves selling bricks to the builders throwing up back to back hovels in the new industrial towns of the north west of England where Cotton was King.  One of the designers of the hovels even had his name and an article written about him in ‘Hovel and Gardens’ (March Edition of 1893) where the writer waxed lyrical about the possibilities of cramming over fifteen people into the four roomed houses he was designing.  To quote from the article, “This is surely a sign of the things to come.  I predict by 1984 these hovels will be declared Bijou Residences by the hoi poloi of the times”.  How right he was! 

I digress somewhat.  One of the Catherall clan even decided to open a pottery in Stoke on Trent.  He decided after a few years that this was not the right place to build a pottery, so closed it down and opened it up in West Yorkshire in a place called Halifax.  He closed the first place down in Stoke on Trent about two weeks before a chappie called Josiah Wedgewood decided he would give it a whirl.  Name rings any bells? As if!

You getting the picture now?  All in all, the Catheralls have made various names for themselves over the years, some good, some – well, not so good, and others downright bad.  I’m one of the good ones.  Honest!!

So, having spent years and years researching the Catherall family tree only to find that my dear cousin Judith (husband of David – getting confused? So was I when she first telephoned me and said who she was and who her husband was.  My name is David as well), had done the job for me.  And what a job she had done.  Pretty fantastic in truth.  She had a real advantage though, she lives spitting distance from the UK headquarters of the Mormon family history research centre in Yorkshire, so she had all the names on her doorstep, so to speak.

End of my family research then?  No, not at all.  Being ever so resourceful I decided that I would research my mothers’ side of the family.  Now this was interesting, as she was born in Australia, and it is something I will probably write about later in a few days time.