One of the things that got me hooked on genealogy was a huge folder of Victorian-era letters and documents that was somehow passed down to me through the family. They were collected by an accountant from Leeds, William Donald Barbour (1832-1903), who adopted my great-grandfather. Over the years they have provided endless puzzles, as I read the words of long dead ancestors, and tried to understand what they were talking about.
William Barbour spent 40 years wondering what had happened to two men who disappeared near the Niagara Falls in 1850. One of these men was my great-great-great grandfather, and I too became interested in their fate. In the end I was to uncover an act of betrayal that had remained undetected for 168 years.
Along the way, I got to know a whole cast of figures, including a charismatic Scottish tailor, a drunk Irish doctor, a mad Irish earl and a ruthless Devonian soldier, which enabled me to trace the ancestry of these ordinary people all the way back to King Edward III. This would have been completely impossible without the letters preserved by William Barbour.
So I wrote a book to tell their tale. It includes images and transcriptions of dozens of the letters, photos taken when I visited Ireland and Canada in pursuit of my lost ancestors, and the story I uncovered of love and betrayal by the Niagara Falls.
Chris West Ancestry Blog 