Absolutely. We should be looking for the facts--not judging people. They did what they did. Just like we do. And sometimes there was a gap between what they said and what they did. Just like there is with us. I did find myself smiling, though, when politicians exhorted us to return to Victorian values. Er...which Victorian values, exactly, Mr Major? The Queen's? Or my great-granny's? Sometimes, though, I do judge people--as winners. Here is the story that took part of the family to Lancashire. Rosina Crawley was born in 1831 in the Workhouse in Islington, Middlesex and baptised in St Mary's Parish Church in Islington. Her mother, Louisa Crawley, was 17 at the time and unmarried. Louisa said Rosina's father was Arthur Hemp, a horse dealer from Beckenham, and the Poor Law people believed her because they made an affiliation order against Arthur under which he had to pay 2/6d per week for Rosina's upkeep. In fact, he only paid it when he was sent to jail for debt. Louisa went on to have two more children, though not straight away - they were spaced out and almost certainly had different fathers. We have to accept the possibility that Louisa was on the game. The first child after Rosina was Matthew Crawley Challenor - or that's what she said later he was called - but no such birth was ever registered. The final child was Agnes Challenor - but I have seen Agnes's birth certificate and she was registered as Agness Crawley. The name Challenor only appears three times. First, in the 1851 Census, when Louisa calls herself Louisa Challenor and claims to be a widow - but there is no sign of a wedding in the ten years before that, she was Louisa Crawley in the 1841 Census, and nor is the death of a Henry Challenor or Matthew Challenor registered. Second, when Matthew marries - on his marriage certificate he says he is the son of Matthew Challenor who is conveniently dead. And, third, when Rosina marries Henry Walters, claiming to be Rosina Challenor and, like Matthew, saying that her father is dead (although she calls him Henry and not Matthew). Frankly, I think Henry Challenor was a figment of Louisa Crawley's imagination. At 17, she was a single mother in the Islington Workhouse. On her death at the age of 63, she was living in comfort in Birkdale, which is really quite a posh area, with a son-in-law who employed eight people. My guess would be that the Walters family disapproved of a serial unmarried mother. Which does, of course, raise the question: How did Rosina land Henry Walters in the first place? How did they even meet? Well, we can't know how they met. But when they married, Henry Walters was 35 and a printer and Rosina was a 21 year old brush maker who couldn't write her own name. I'd guess that Henry was a bit of a sad old bachelor, that Rosina was a looker, and that he fell for her and her mother made sure she got him. I can hear it now: 'That's not a half crown trick, Rosina. That's a meal ticket. Land it!' It also suggests an answer to the question: Why did they leave London and move to Liverpool? My guess, once again, is that the kind of society a master printer might move in would not take kindly to Rosina and her mother, so they moved 200 miles to a city where they were not known and invented a more polite history than the one they actually had. I look back at Rosina and Louisa, and I think, "Good onyer, girls." Rosina's grandchildren, btw, were models of rectitude and pillars of society. And then there was another great-granny, Agnes Williams/?/Marsh, born in 1868 in Aspul more than a year after the man named on her birth cert as her father, Enoch Williams, had died in a roof fall in Haigh Pit and three years before her widowed mother married William Marsh. She was born in the most dire circumstances but ended up married to a Pit Deputy in County Durham--and, as they used to say in Durham pit villages, "In them days a Deputy was a Deputy." The human capacity for survival is tremendous. (If it were not, given the desperate lives our forefathers led, none of us would be here). I shall be sorry to leave this discussion for the next few days but I fly today from Riyadh to Jeddah and I can't usually get online from the hotel I use there. They do, though, have the most wonderful fish, fresh out of the Red Sea each day. I wonder what Rosina would have made of that? John Lynch Hi, John, I recognise your story, but I cannot offer any explanation. My paternal grandmother was known to my generation after she had died as being hard on her children about sex before marriage. But, she had a son by her husband to be and was pregnant with her second child when they were married. On the other side, my mother's elder sister was unbelieving when her daughter pointed out that she must have been conceived before her parents were married. The first was a Proddy lady (I am not sure that is strictly acceptable today but ...) and the other was a Cat-olic I warn people searching the Censuses, etc., not to judge people, but to determine the facts. The stories have been interesting and confirm (to me, at least) the advice I offer. Thanks to all, Jim Lancaster (Bury, Lancs.)