When 21-year-old postgraduate student Ben Hammond was ill in bed for a few weeks, he needed something to occupy his mind. That something was tracing his family tree.
“My mum has always had an interest in family history,” he says. “But she just had a few bits and bobs of information written down. I thought I would go a bit further, because now there are the resources to do it.”
When Hammond’s mother started her own research, it involved lengthy and sometimes frustrating investigations in record offices. Hammond, on the other hand, had the vast resources of Ancestry at his disposal, finding it easy to research from the confines of his bed.
“I thought: ‘There is all of this information available, there’s so much to find out that’s close to me. It’s not just abstract data. This is a really personal thing that’s worth investigating.’”
Starting with the information he already had about his mother’s line – at that point, dating back to the late 1800s – he set about seeing what he could find out.
Hammond under a portrait of Joseph Trapp, his eight-times great-grandfather
It was much easier than he had expected. Ancestry has more than a billion searchable UK family history records, including censuses from 1841 to1911; the birth, marriage and death indexes from 1837 to 2005; and UK incoming passenger lists from 1878 to 1960. There are also parish records from some counties – in some places dating back to the 1300s. Ancestry also has many family and historic photographs connected to those family trees that are visible to the public. Hammond discovered this when he was doing his research and spotted something he recognised: an 18th-century painting.
At the time, Hammond was studying for an MPhil in theology at the University of Oxford and he spent many hours in the university’s Bodleian library.
“I used to sit in one of the lower reading rooms – that was where the books I was using for my course were shelved. I would sit at a table 10ft away, directly under a painting. I hadn’t paid any attention to the painting even though I had been sitting there for most of a year.”
Joseph Trapp had been a professor of poetry at Oxford
To his great surprise, this turned out to be a portrait of his eight times great-grandfather, Joseph Trapp, the first professor of poetry at the University of Oxford in 1708. Joseph Trapp had been a fellow of Wadham College, and Hammond discovered the college had a whole room dedicated to him. He was astonished.
“I was on a high for the best part of a month,” he says.
An etching of the Bodleian Libraries
Building on this research, Hammond then discovered further ancestors, not suspecting they had a shared interest: theology. His 10-times great-grandfather, Joseph Trapp’s grandfather John, was born in 1601. John studied the subject at Christ Church, Oxford, later becoming a preacher. John Trapp’s commentaries on the bible were considered humorous and scholarly; some were even republished 200 years later.
“I found an etching of him inside one of his books,” says Hammond.
Details from inside the library
Theology was a common vocation for generations of male Trapps, with several clergymen among their number. Some of their descendants worked on the railways; subsequent generations were in the police force.
For centuries, the family was based in Gloucestershire, as Hammond found when he looked through online parish records. His grandmother, whose surname had been Trapp, broke with this when she moved to Norfolk.
“Fact checking is the most arduous part of the task,” says Hammond. “I didn’t want to take any information for granted.”
For instance, some people put incorrect information on their family trees, and he wanted to make sure he wasn’t assuming things were right when they were not.
“It’s about making sure I could connect the people with their records. That was the hardest thing, but it was still easier than I assumed. I think that was the majority of the work,” he says.
There is still more he can do, too.
“I have gone back to about 1500, but I can’t go much further than that. There are also a couple of names I don’t know much about,” he says.
Theology was a common vocation for generations of male Trapps
Most of the work he has done so far has been online via Ancestry, but Hammond has become interested enough to explore further afield.
“There is a Trapp coat of arms; my great-grandfather had it. My mother remembers seeing it, but it can only be inherited by the male line. Now I’ve seen it on a memorial in west London, in books, and on a painting in Gloucestershire.”
Hammond: ‘The chances are your family tree is just as fascinating’
Hammond and his mother have spent many hours talking about what he has discovered. Some of his friends are also intrigued, joking about the possibilities of being related to a nobleman.
“I think family trees grow out exponentially. The chances are your family tree is just as fascinating, and I think that’s true of pretty much everyone,” he says.
As Ancestry has 20bn searchable family records from around the world, there is always scope to find out more – wherever your ancestors came from.
Discover your backstory by charting your family tree. Start a 14-day free trial at ancestry.co.uk
