Warrillow - that's an interesting name......

It is rather inevitable that with my surname, I am regularly asked: “That’s an unusual name, where does it come from?”

 And believe me, I’ve tried to find out. Even before ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ became a hit on the nation’s television screens and even before censuses stretching back to the 1870s could be easily searched on a computer screen, I was looking for my ancestors.

 I’ve trawled through ancient records books and newspaper files in libraries as far apart as Worcester and West Yorkshire; I’ve spoken to my few remaining elderly relatives; I’ve stood in graveyards in Bewdley and Dewsbury looking for signs on gravestones. And I’ve come up with........... precisely nothing.

 Watching ‘WDYTYA?’ drives me to distraction because the celebrities featured obviously have teams of archivists and researchers searching through the records before the programme is even commissioned. I, as the only son of an only son, have just me to do the research.

 And as the years go on and I become ever more aware that, as the childless only son of an only son, the Warrillow line will expire when I do, I become ever more determined to find some answers.

 So here’s where we stand at the moment. My father, whose 76th birthday on May 18 2012 coincides with the writing of this post (Happy birthday, Dad!) lives pleasantly and healthily in retirement in southern Spain.

 The death of his father is my first memory of the loss of a close family member. My grandfather spent all his working life in a carpet factory in Kidderminster, in the days when the industry provided employment for almost all the working-class men of that Worcestershire town.

 He retired in 1972 and like so many men of his ilk, even today, had no clue what to do with himself when going to work in the factory didn’t dominate his life.

 I still remember the telephone ringing early one Saturday morning in 1973 and waking me up, before my dad rushed out of our house to where his father lived, less than a mile or so away.

 I don’t remember my great-grandfather - and that’s where the problems start. Albert Warrillow appears to have been born in 1872 and died in 1963, a year before I was born. If you follow the obvious trail through websites such as ancestry.co.uk, it leads you back to a family who lived in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent in the 1830s. Yet family stories put the Warrillows in the 1870s in West Yorkshire, somewhere around Heckmondwike or Batley. It seems that they moved from there to Kidderminster, following the carpetmaking or woollen trades from the White Rose county.

 And I can find nothing in the records to support this. It seems that my great-grandfather was married twice, following the tragic early death of his first wife; when asked about it by my father when I was still a toddler, his second wife appears to have refused to say anything. These things were not talked about in Victorian England.

 So here is where the brick wall starts to be constructed. I have found records which suggest that Albert Warrillow was either born in or placed into a workhouse; I can’t find anything to confirm that. I have a piece of paper which purports to be Albert’s marriage certificate; where his father’s signature should be, there is a simple ‘X’

 This, of course, is not wholly surprising because many working-class people in these times were barely able to read and write - but it is of no use to those of us trying to trace the family history!

Now, I may have a name for Albert’s second wife but if you key that into the 1911 census records, it brings up roughly a dozen possible answers. The researchers and genealogists on ‘WDYTYA’ may have time to sort through them all in search of the right one; as a freelance journalist trying to keep the financial wolf from the door and the bills paid, I don’t.

 So I guess this post is aimed at those of you out there who have done this and succeeded. Is there a right and a wrong way to go about it? In the internet age, is it still necessary to spend hours in libraries and local records offices trawling through ancient documents?

 Of course, I don’t expect to find the answer in five minutes; I would just like to know that I’m going about it the right way - and that my dad and I can discover it before it’s too late.