John Culme, who for many years has been connected with Sotheby's Silver Department, is author of several books and articles, including The Directory of Gold and Silversmiths, 1838-1914, published in 1987, and co-author with Nicholas Rayner of The Jewels of the Duchess of Windsor. He is also a Liveryman of the Goldsmiths' Company, London. The dreaded credit crunch doesn’t appear to have reached the family history world.
Last week, I was at Who Do You Think You Are? Live in Olympia to value family heirlooms brought in by the (thousands of) visitors. More used to the scholarly calm of the annual antiques fairs at the same venue, I was staggered by the vast queue stretching around the building before the show opened.
Inside the aisles soon filled up as people crushed around the various stands promoting genealogical resources such as ancestry.com, findmypast.com and the National Archives. The family historians were a pretty ruthless lot (with sharp elbows) as they pressed forward with steely eyed determination onto the besieged experts. Unsurprisingly, most looked retired and of a certain age as it takes time (and money) to pursue such an obsessive hobby. You can of course, never know it all and one small lead can take you in unexpected directions.
The College of Arms was flying the flag for heraldry and I passed a happy few minutes watching an illustrator preparing a coat of arms on their stand. Otherwise, the subject seemed poorly served so I expect a flood of silver surfers when our site goes live in April as people drop in to find their family crest. One visitor who now knows what to look for is actor Kevin Whately who on the latest edition of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? was shown (to his evident surprise) a version of his crest on the tomb of an ancestor. He may not know, however, that the Whately crest, a Stag’s Head, is shared by dozens of other families thus giving Kevin an excellent chance, in time, of finding a nice piece of antique silver with it on at My Family Silver…..
