Accidents and Suicides Killed My Ancestors

Alison Burtt grew up with a sense of mystery as her father was unable to tell her much about his roots. The truth she uncovered was shocking, Matt Ford discovers.

- Matt Ford

For Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine reader Alison Burtt, the fact that her father, William Allison Macdonald Hartley, was the only child of an only child meant that he was the one person she could ask about the history of his side of the family. But he had nothing to tell and so the mystery deepened. That might have been the end of her journey had Alison not made a discovery 35 years ago that unlocked a tragic past.

“I had just got married,” Alison says. “I was doing some sewing and wanted to get a piece of material from a box of offcuts that my mother kept in the loft.

“I went around to her house and, when I got to the box, sitting on the top there was a load of papers that my dad had picked up when he went to clear out his mother’s house. There were birth certificates, marriage certificates and photographs.

“I’d always been interested in history, but that was the moment when I decided to find out more about my own family.

“A friend at church who was an amateur genealogist said to me: ‘You’ll have to write to all your relatives and find out what they know.’ So that’s what I did.”

But it was the arrival of the internet that really enabled Alison to get started on her father’s side of the family. “I found that I was able to add generations quite quickly using birth and marriage registers and census records,” she says. “This was aided by the fact that my Hartley family were farmers and they had been very specific as to their place of birth on the census entries: Kiddal Lane, Barwick-in Elmet, Yorkshire.

“Finding the death and burial records and the relatives missing from the 1891 census proved more problematical, but once solved revealed a tragic train accident, two suicides, and an attempted suicide.”