If you are looking for a family or local history speaker during 2025 and 2026, here are the details of my current talks:
- Charles the Pigeon and a Yorkshire Spy.
- Local Links to the Lusitania.
- My Batley St Mary’s One-Place Study. (Covers the history of the Irish in Batley and the Catholic parish of Batley St Mary of the Angels until turn of the 20th century).
- The Home Front: the White Lee Explosion of 1914 and the Unlucky History of the Site (available from September 2026).
- Tips for Researching your Great War Ancestors. This is based around my book about Northern Union – rugby league – players killed in the First World War. For local history groups, I can drop the research tips aspect, and base the talk solely about the players.
- How to Research your Family Tree. This talk will help those embarking on their family history journey, but it will also provide useful reminders and advice for those who have already started out on their ancestral adventure.
The first four have a distinctly Yorkshire flavour. The fifth will be tailored around rugby league players from your locality. The family tree research talk can be geared around research tips for Yorkshire ancestors.
Charles the Pigeon and a Yorkshire Spy is the story of an unsung Yorkshire hero, living behind enemy lines and carrying out works of espionage and sabotage during World War One. His adopted pigeon Charles played an important part in these wartime exploits. Their daring deeds are more like a boy’s adventure story than real life. But this is a true tale of wartime courage, and one which deserves wider telling.
Local Links to the Lusitania focuses on people with Yorkshire connections on board the Cunard liner, torpedoed and sunk off the Irish coast on 7 May 1915. The sinking did not affect only the rich and famous. Many Yorkshire people were involved. This talk explores some of their stories.
There is a possibility this talk can be tailored to your local area.
My Batley St Mary’s talk is based around my one-place study into the Catholic parish of St Mary of the Angels, with a focus on its early history and period up to the 1880s. It investigates what a one-place study is, why I embarked on one, why I chose this particular study, as well as my findings – including the Irish migration angle, how they were received locally, the building of the church, all with a focus on ordinary parishioners.
The Home Front: the White Lee Explosion of 1914 is a talk based around the events of December 1914 when a devastating explosion, caused during the manufacture of picric acid for the war effort, took place at White Lee. It resulted in deaths and injuries, as well as damage across a vast area of Batley, Heckmondwike and the Spen Valley. It is an event often overlooked because of later explosions in Yorkshire at Low Moor and Barnbow. This talk aims to provide more information about this Heavy Woollen District incident, the forerunner to the later explosions. The talk will explore the unlucky history of the site, as well as the events on the day and the aftermath.
Based on my groundbreaking book The Greatest Sacrifice: Fallen Heroes of the Northern Union about rugby league players who died in World War One, the talk investigates the stories behind some of the men. It is also packed with tips for researching your own Great War Army ancestors.
In this talk I will guide you through building your family tree. I will cover the basics to help you start your research on the right track, give you lots of tips, help you avoid those all-important pitfalls, and provide ideas for taking your research further. If required, I can slant this talk towards Yorkshire ancestral research.
For more details about these talks, including cost and booking one, please contact me at: pasttopresentgenealogy@btinternet.com
Past To Present Genealogy 