Star Trek and family history – any connection? Theresa’s quest demonstrates there very much is…
My favourite TV programme of all time has to be Star Trek. From seeing the original episode in the mid-1960s, on a blip of a TV with a 6’ black-and-white grainy picture, I was well and truly hooked from day one. What I loved about the programme was the way the captain and crew would find themselves in all kinds of impossible situations – yet Captain Kirk always, somehow – against impossible odds – would manage to think his way out of a situation and restore order and balance in the universe. I loved his cheeky ingenuity, and since that very first episode I never missed a single one. The same goes for Picard and the wonderful Janeway (from Voyager). They were all blessed with the oldfashioned gift of nous and creativity.
That’s all well and good, I hear you say, but what’s that got to do with family history? Well, quite a lot in my experience. Their approach to problems can be used to help us tackle ours. We’ve all come up against that odious obstruction called the brick wall, and walls as we know, can be made of different materials and thicknesses; some are just simply plywood – and we manage to get through relatively comfortably – but other walls can be made of solid tungsten, with locks! And no matter how much we battle on, the darn thing just won’t budge! Captain Kirk can manage to demolish his wall in an hour, no matter what it’s made of – but mere mortals like us can work on them for decades without even a dent! Perpetual Groundhog Day. Kirk had the luxury of time travel – sadly, we don’t! Even the most experienced genealogists among us have a nemesis in the form of a wall, and I’d like to tell you about mine – the most solid of walls, and how it took almost 20 years to pick the lock and open that solid tungsten door.
Back to 1767
I’d managed to trace my mother’s paternal line back to 1767 with the birth of my 4x great-grandfather William Tennant. But what was eluding me was his place of birth, a common problem for many, before civil records, but one which is usually solveable with a bit of hard work. But that was not to be in this case.
This line of the family was Scottish. William Tennant’s son, Thomas Tennant was born in Stirling and subsequently, his son George Tennant was a native of Dundee, so I expected the Scottish thread to continue back. But I could not find a parish record confirming his birth. I had some details from the baptism record in 1815 of Thomas Tennant which confirmed his father William was an Army Pensioner. I next searched the indexes (on the pay-per-view sites) to see if I could find William’s attestation documents and I was successful, learning a great deal of information about him from these fabulous old documents.
In 1789, William was based in Gibraltar with the 25th Regiment of Foot, guarding the Mediterranean